Truth is constructed fact by fact as a beautiful outhouse is constructed brick by brick.
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Once about Knowledge and knowledge systems, especially knowledge applied to economic development, but since I retired branching into politics, music and whatever catches my attention.
Ten years ago The Economist dubbed Africa “the hopeless continent”. Since then its progress has been remarkably hopeful. In 2000-08 Africa’s annual output grew by 4.9% (adjusted for purchasing-power parity), twice as fast as in the 1980s and 1990s and faster than the global average of 3.8%. Foreign direct investment increased from $10 billion to $88 billion—more than India ($42 billion) and, even more remarkably, catching up with China ($108 billion). The Boston Consulting Group notes that, since 1998, the revenues of Africa’s 500 largest companies (excluding banks) have grown at an average of 8.3% a year.
The genome sequenced by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (actually a composite from several individuals) took 13 years and cost $3 billion. Now, using the latest sequencers from Illumina, of San Diego, California, a human genome can be read in eight days at a cost of about $10,000. Nor is that the end of the story. Another Californian firm, Pacific Biosciences, of Menlo Park, has a technology that can read genomes from single DNA molecules. It thinks that in three years’ time this will be able to map a human genome in 15 minutes for less than $1,000. And a rival technology being developed in Britain by Oxford Nanopore Technologies aspires to similar speeds and cost.
BOOKS AS WEAPONS: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II by John B. HenchThere is a streaming video of an interview with the author on C-SPAN and a useful review of the book.
“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
Since the early days of the Republic, talented foreigners have streamed to our shores to till the soil, build industries, and turn the country into a scientific and technological powerhouse. They converted the U.S. into the first global nation, giving us adaptability, an intuitive feel for other cultures, and an innovative edge.
We see living proof of what they can accomplish in the lives of Sergey Brin (pictured left), Jerry Yang (right), and Pierre Omidyar (center). All three came here as the children of legal immigrants and grew up with the blessings of opportunity in their adopted land. And guess what: They went on to start Google, Yahoo!, and eBay. Nor are they alone in their contributions. From 1995 to 2005, legal immigrants were CEOs or lead technologists in one of every four U.S. tech and engineering start-ups and half of those in Silicon Valley. These companies employed some 450,000 people before the recession hit.
It’s now commonplace to see foreign-born students dominating U.S. graduate programs in science, math, and technology. Not long ago, it was joked that MIT stood for “Made in Taiwan.” Immigrants have accounted for 70 or so of 315 American Nobel Prize winners since 1901 and, according to one study, about half of all patents issued in the past decade.
But that flow of talent is starting to reverse course. The U.S. imposes so many limits on the numbers of legal immigrants and, since 9/11, has introduced such a thicket of red tape that many who would have come here are now staying home. Moreover, their native countries have become more alluring: By a 9 to 1 ratio, Chinese respondents to a recent survey said they had better opportunities to start businesses in China than in the U.S. By a 2 to 1 margin, Indians said their home country provided better education for their children.
There are two main ways high-skilled foreigners can now gain entry to the U.S. -- and both are too restrictive. First, they can apply for permanent residency, a so-called green card. The trouble is that less than 20% of the 1.1 million legal permanent residents admitted each year are highly skilled. Second, foreigners can apply for a temporary six-year visa, the H-1B, but the cap for those is just 85,000 a year. Far more apply than can get in, and there are huge backlogs and long waits (as much as 20 years) for scientists and engineers.
Strikingly, leaders on both sides of the Congressional aisle agree that we should open the doors wider to skilled foreigners, but they have allowed this issue to become entangled with that of illegal immigration. This approach to talent is loony -- what The Economist calls a “policy of national self-sabotage.”
According to a story in The Independent (UK) on Tuesday, the investigation into the sale of fake bomb detectors has been expanded to a number of firms in the UK. It seemed comical fourteen years ago when we learned that golfers were buying fraudulent golf-ball finders (WN 12 Jan 96). The Quadro Tracker was nothing but an antenna mounted on a pistol-grip with a swivel that was free to rotate 360°. An almost imperceptible deviation of the swivel from horizontal would cause the antenna to rotate to its lowest point under the force of gravity. To a credulous observer it might seem to be controlled by some mysterious external force. Quadro soon began marketing them to law enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense for $995 each to search for drugs and weapons. After it failed a simple test, Sandia National Labs dissected one and found it contained no internal parts. The FBI shut Quadro down and arrested its officers (WN 26 Jan 96). However, the device soon reappeared in the UK as the ADE 651, sold by ATSC for prices as high as $48,000. As WN reported (WN 29 Jan 2010), at least 1,500 were sold to the government of Iraq as bomb detectors at a cost of millions of dollars. Reliance on the fake bomb detectors reportedly contributed to hundreds of bomb deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, including British and American troops.I wonder how many of us are careful in evaluating information we receive from people, but accept information we receive from a "measuring instrument"? Of course the credulity of the consumer does not excuse the fraud of the vendor, but there may be a lesson here for us consumers.
Great concern has been voiced for at least 30 years about the sad state of U.S. primary and secondary education in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology, but little real progress has been made. The most recent findings from the U.S. Department of Education brought no optimism. In 2005, 32% of all U.S. fourth-graders and 41% of eighth-graders scored below expected achievement levels in science. Nearly 30% of entering college students needed remedial science and math courses. However, we are at a moment in U.S. history to finally address one cause of the problems, and the scientific community needs to help capture this unique opportunity.The United States can not afford to be in the bottom third of achievement in teaching science, and Leshner, Malcolm and Roseman are right that strong national standards would be a step in the right direction!
The many national commissions and studies of science education in the past three decades have consistently identified the same two issues and potential remedies: a need for much better-prepared math and science teachers and for a clear statement of learning goals for science that are the same across the United States. The consistency would remove some of the disadvantages faced by students in states with less rigorous standards, and it would ease students' mobility across state boundaries. It would also help the United States develop robust curriculum and assessment materials and prepare teachers who understand the science to use such tools to help students reach the standards. Nearly all of America's competitor countries have national science education standards and score much higher on international science achievement assessments: U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 21st among students in 30 developed nations in science on the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment.
A new study* for the Office of Fair Trading, Britain’s main competition-policy watchdog, seems to confirm that the way prices are presented, or “framed”, can tempt consumers into error. Its authors, Steffen Huck and Brian Wallace of University College London (UCL), and Charlotte Duke of London Economics, a consultancy, base that finding on a controlled experiment. They tested responses to five different price frames: “drip pricing”, where only part of the price is revealed at first and extra charges are levied as the sale progresses (think of buying an airline ticket online); “sales”, where the price is contrasted with a higher price (was $2, now $1); “complex pricing”, such as three-for-two offers, where the unit price has to be worked out; “baiting”, where a cheap deal is advertised but restricted to a few lucky shoppers; and “time-limited offers” that are available for a short period......Comment: Of course retailers have been working hard for a long time figuring out how to price things, and I suppose buyers have also been learning which framings to avoid. Still it is nice to see controlled experimental evidence added to the body of information demonstrating that people act more or less irrationally according to the way their decisions are framed.
How did shoppers fare? Faced with per-unit prices, shoppers made the right choices four times out of five. But when errors were made they were costly. The average lost pay-off per round compared with the best strategy was enough to cut the maximum score by a quarter. The errors were still larger in the rounds where prices were framed differently. The authors calculated the additional loss each subject suffered in response to each price frame compared with the baseline case. The average extra loss was then used to rank the five price frames. Shoppers were worst off under drip pricing, followed by time-limited offers, baiting, sales and complex pricing.
The big shift is towards a universally useful written Globish. Spellchecking and translation software mean that anyone can communicate in comprehensible written English. That skill once required mastery of orthographical codes and subtle syntax acquired over years. The English of e-mail, Twitter and text messaging is becoming far more mutually comprehensible than spoken English, which is fractured by differences in pronunciation, politeness and emphasis. Mr McCrum aptly names the new lingo “a thoroughfare for all thoughts”.
Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate—often impotently—between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher’s argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay’s view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth.