Credibility: Authority and Standards

Thomas Friedman, in The Lexus and The Olive Tree, tells the story of a Chinese judge, Wang Guoliang, who complained that he was getting a lot of his information from his son, who in turn got it from the Internet. He is quoted:

“But fathers should not be guided by sons. My son also makes suggestions to me, but I don’t like most of what he suggests. The father should not listen to the son. It undermines authority. I told my son to read the Internet less and to study more.”

In reading Friedman, I was impressed by how much credence he seems to give to anecdotes and to the people he interviews. Indeed, he seems to cite people as if their fame were correlated with their credibility. I found myself wishing that Friedman had fewer anecdotes, and more data; that he had relied more on analysis and less on opinion.

The ICT Revolution Changes Cultural Patterns of Authority

The Internet is a prototypical example of a technology changing where we go for information. The judge now gets information from his son, who gets it from the Internet; the judge's cultural expectation is that his son would get information from him, and he would get that information from his training and his experience with the world. The judge's world is turned upside down!

Culture institutionalizes where we go for credible information, and changing that cultural pattern is a fundamental cultural change. Think about some of the current controversies. For credible information on the creation of the world, do we go to church where the authorities in turn have gotten that information from sacred texts and professional theologians or do we go to school where the teachers in turn have gotten their information from science texts and professional scientists? Are environmental NGOs or business leaders to be believed about the environment? Do we believe political leaders or do we believe the media when they seem to tell different stories?

The word “authority” has two different meanings. On the one hand, the word refers to the power to give directions – as in the debate on the limits of presidential authority. On the other, it refers to the credibility – as in the authority of religious versus scientific texts. But the two are linked. We hesitate to give power to people who we do not believe, and indeed we tend to believe people to whom we have given power.

Examples of implications:

· Poor people in poor countries have learned on the job, starting work as children. If we want them to go to schools, the schools must be credible sources of useful knowledge. But if the school are the authoritative sources for knowledge, what does that do to the authority of the elders and the community leaders from whom children were supposed to learn in the past?
· People have gotten health advice from family members, neighbors, and traditional practitioners. If we want them to use new health services, those services must be credible sources of health advice. But what does the medical authority of the health auxiliary and doctor do to the traditional authority of older family members and traditional practitioners? How will they react to a potential diminution of their authority.
· Farmers have gotten advice from neighbors and leaders in their farming community. If we want them to seek advice instead from extension workers, that advice should be credible. If farmers do indeed seek the advice of the extension worker instead of that of the community leaders, what does that do to the role of the latter in the community?

It is increasingly possible to replace person-to-person communication with ICT mediated communication in all these situations. Distance education via radio, television or the Internet can substitute for school based education. Health information can be disseminated via radio, television, or other electronic means, and telemedicine is increasingly accessible. Agricultural information is increasingly being disseminated via radio and even via Internet kiosks in rural communities in developing nations. What are the social implications of replacing person to person channels with disembodied channels?

ICT can empower people to seek information from disembodied sources when previously they would have had to resort to personal contact with experts. To what degree can we make the disembodied source credible? (Certainly with expert systems, we can go much further than is possible with mass media.) How do we change the authoritativeness attributed to books, libraries and ICT sources, versus traditional sources, versus professionals from modern systems (such as schools, medical services or agricultural extension services)?

ICT can also be used to improve the information provided by traditional or modern institutions. We can use technology to help the midwives or to help the health auxiliaries, to help the agricultural cooperative leaders or to help the agricultural extension workers, to help the school teachers or to help the traditional councilors in the community. I suspect that those who introduce ICT are modernizers, who naturally think of working with the schools, health centers and agricultural extension services, and do not give appropriate attention to using the technology to help more traditional sources of information. Can this approach always be right?

How do we analyze and understand the social and cultural repercussions of the changes in credibility patterns that are induced by the Information Revolution? More importantly, how do we empower people to control the processes of institutional change in order to ameliorate the undesired impacts of the Information Revolution?

The ICT Revolution Changes the Epistemological Standards We Use to Judge Credibility

There is a lot on the web about the evaluation of information available on website, the credibility of Wikipedia, etc. That is not my subject here.

We all act all the time on information which we feel is “credible enough”. After all, it cost time and effort, and sometimes money, to collect and analyze information. We have to balance the potential benefits and costs of seeking more information (which may not be available or if available still not be accurate) with the likely benefits and costs of acting now with the information we have.

ICT can radically reduce the costs of gathering and analyzing information. It should therefore significantly change the criteria of “good enough”. We should make decisions now on the basis of more and better information, and better analysis of that information, than was appropriate in the past.

Indeed, we should insist that our information sources provide better information, since they too can benefit from technological advances to improve their own information gathering and analysis.

Since the ICT revolution is continuing, the criteria for “good enough” should continue to evolve. Education should prepare people to extend their information gathering and analysis activities in the future, and to appropriately modify their “good enough” criteria in that future.

Mass media includes many more channels, and the Internet and the blogosphere expand and change the nature of the mass media available to us. The changes in communication technology allow us easier point-to-point than even the recent past; we should ask more questions of more carefully chosen informants in our search for information. The Internet makes stocks of information readily available, and digital libraries are coming on line that will make well vetted information more accessible; we should look things up more and more carefully. Computers allow us not only to search text and mine data, but to use quantitative analytic techniques – including statistical analysis and modeling – to improve our understanding of data; we should analyse more and more quantitatively.

More and better information is transforming markets. It is transforming the way organizations are run, including governments, businesses and NGOs. Citizens should demand more and better information on their governments, and demand that more an better information on their views be available to and used by legislators and government administrators. More and better information is transforming health care and educational service systems. And ultimately, more and better information will transform society and culture.

The question is, how do we improve the process by which these transformations are taking place? How do we create appropriate levels of demand for more and better information? How do we disseminate continually increasing demands? How are the demand and supply of more and better information to be coordinated? Education to equip people in all their roles as information consumers to evaluate information well is an important element of the strategy. But what other public policies and institutional changes are required?

Monitoring and Evaluation

What are the indicators to be used of the quality and quantity of information used in decision making? How does one attribute changes in the use of information in decision making to project or program interventions? These are difficult issues, but I suggest they are critical issues for those of us interested in social and economic development.

Even more difficult are the issues of deciding what is good or bad. Do we ask the judge or the son whether it is good that the father is now getting more advice from the son? Do we ask the traditional or the modern source of education and advice whether the substitution of the latter by the former is good or bad? It is not only a situation in which “where you stand depends on where you sit”. The values a culture holds dear change as that culture changes. As the ICT revolution changes culture, it will change the values held by the members of that culture.

Clearly, foreigners do not understand cultural values as well as the members of teh culture itself, and consequently (as we have learned from hard experience) they foreigners should be hesitant to induce technological changes with major cultural impacts! I see no good alternative but to seek to help people within a culture understand the institutional changes that the ICT revolution is to bring, and to try to empower them to exert some control over the introduction of ICT into their own societies. Given how difficult it has been in my own culture to project the impacts of ICT, how controversial those impacts have been, and how difficult it is to change the course of the ICT revolution, I am not optimistic about the chances of so empowering the peoples of developing nations to make good decisions on the technology they will adopt and the cultural changes that they will encourage.

"The Information Puzzle"

Read the full article By Sam Palmisano (CEO of IBM) in Newsweek (December 2, 2005).

IBM has a unique perspective on innovation. It has earned the most U.S. patents of any corporation in each of the past 12 years, yet it is also the leading business investor and innovator in the open movement. Its CEO explains the apparent contradiction. He distinguishes between "open source" and "open standards" as follows:

* Open source is a method of tapping a community of experts to develop useful things.....In a sense, open source fuels innovation much the way science fuels technology. Science is created by communities of experts, whose fundamental discoveries are typically made available to all, including individuals and companies that are able to capitalize on the new knowledge in novel ways.

* Open standards, in contrast, are not a methodology, but an underlying condition for economic or social progress because they make possible the free flow of capital, information and ideas. A currency system is an open standard. A highway system is an open standard. The Bill of Rights is an open standard of sorts. The Internet's founding protocols—http, html, etc.—are important open standards.

He also distinguishes between "intellectual property" and "intellectual capital".

"More and more of the innovation that truly matters today functions not only as intellectual property (the brilliant work of individuals), but as intellectual capital (a deep well of knowledge created collaboratively). As with open standards, this is about enlarging the pie and fostering innovation on top of what is available to all. And it's not about gizmos, but about new enterprise models—such as "networkless" telecoms, online auctions or real-time retail systems. Our intellectual-property laws, based on an earlier paradigm, will have to catch up."

In the end, the new, emerging model of collaborative innovation—balancing different aspects of openness and different kinds of ownership, and drawing on the historic and deeply productive relationship between science and technology—has the simplicity and clarity that we always find in big, game-changing shifts.

ESTNet: The ECA Science and Technology Network

Go to the ESTNet website.

ESTNET stands for the United Nation's Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Science and Technology Network. It is a collaborative policy research network promoting the dissemination and exchange of information related to science and technology management and policy issues in Africa. ESTNET aims to increase the understanding of issues and policies related to science and technology that bear specifically on the development of African countries in the current context of the global economy. Its ultimate objective is to provide a comprehensive 'one stop shop' information service for S&T policymakers and other stakeholders in Africa. The website contains information on the ESTNet meetings and reports, as well as on S&T projects in Africa. There is an especially extensive set of links related to S&T in Africa.

"Scientists praise new UK ethics code"

Read the full article by Stephen Pincock in The Scientist.

"A new ethical code which sets out the values and responsibilities of all scientists will be launched later this year, the British government said this week. The code has been welcomed by researchers who say it might help junior scientists blow the whistle on senior colleagues and serve as a basis for more specific codes of conduct."

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

I have been reading Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Here are some comments I would share:

The overall point he makes – that the world is changing with commerce becoming more global now that the Cold War is over – is obviously correct.

The book was written at the height of the dot.com bubble, and Friedman was more impressed with the impact of the technology then than I am now. But many of us were more optimistic seven or eight years ago.

The book seems to assume that the virtues of the American system that lead to rapid innovation in Internet technology were the virtues of the future. It was not so long ago that the virtues that Japan typifies, virtues that lead to technology deepening and high quality, were seen as paramount. The Economist has suggested that in the future the situation may change and Japanese style virtues may again dominate those of the American style (or indeed, the virtues of Indian or Chinese culture may dominate).

Friedman treats the Information Revolution as if "all good things go together". He seems not to consider that people with malevolence in their hearts will seek to harness the technology for their own ends, to the detriment of others. Unfortunately, some of the corrupt are likely to enhance their corruption with ICT; some of the power hunger are likely to utilize the technology to coerce more effectively; some of the greedy are likely to achieve their greedy ends at electronic speeds. While Friedman recognized that hackers might use ICT for destructive ends, he did not seem to foresee that terrorists would use their laptops and the Internet to advance international terrorism.

Friedman is a journalist and the book is often fun to read, since he has developed the skills of a professional newspaperman. It is full of anecdotes and quotes from people who generally have something to say. I found however, that it took too long to make its points, and that it lacked the rigor that a more quantitative treatment might have produced. Arguing anecdotally is helpful when the anecdotes are prototypical, but dangerous when they are atypical. Interviews are great when the interviewee is right, but perilous when the interviewee is wrong.

The chapter on the McDonnald's theory of modern war already had to be revised between the first and second edition of the book. Friedman did not seem to predict that the United States and a few allies would invade Iraq. He does not discuss the high level of civil and limited wars.

The Lexus versus the Olive Tree

The title refers to the warring tendencies for growth of political and economic systems to take advantage of economies of scale versus the emphasis on local autonomy and local control. This was an issue faced by the founding fathers of the United States of America, and resolved for centuries in the U.S. Constititution.

Today globalization is clearly taking place. It is not the first time that large areas have been unified for commerce. One thinks about the Persians, the Greeks and Phoenicians, the Romans, China and the Mongols. At the peak of Islamic power, it was possible for a Moslem to travel peacefully from Spain to China in Islamic lands. In all these cases, there were limits to expansion related to the transportation and communications technologies of their times. The political and economic institutions differed from empire to empire, but all of these failed eventually.

In the time leading to World War I, European powers created huge colonial empires, and there was an era of globalized trade analogous to our own. That era ended with the two world wars and the Great Depression. I suppose the current era will also end, but Friedman doesn’t seem to tell us how or when.

Free Market Capitalism

It seems to me that Friedman sees the American brand of Free Market Capitalism as providing the basis for globalization, and this is certainly true in the sense that the fall of Communism undermined Communism as an alternative. He was writing at the peak of success of the Washington Consensus, which defined privatization of state enterprises and export-oriented production as priorities for development. The book today seems optimistic about the universality of the American brand of capitalism given the success of countries such as India and China with their versions, the failures of Latin America and Africa to grow rapidly and their versions, and the continued success of more socialistic states in Europe.

The six D’s

The book sets out six dimensions for the analysis of globalization, based on Friedman’s learning experiences as a reporter: politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and environment. Not a bad list, if somewhat short.

The main item left out, in my opinion, is the nature of the real world. It counts who has the oil! HIV/AIDS is a factor in Africa. Land-locked countries lag economically. Geographic access to markets helps.

Friedman’s concern with institutions and governance seems pretty conventional. Everyone I know has talked about getting the institutions and policies right for decades.

Getting institutions right is not all that easy. The United States, for example, has institutionalized a political system that gives rural states more Senatorial power in comparison with the large urban states than their population would justify. This will not be easily changed. We have institutionalized worker protection systems (insurance, pensions, wage increases) and some of our enterprises are finding it difficult to compete in the new globalized economy, but the protections will not be easily changed.

This blog focuses on Knowledge for Development, and I was pleased to read in the just published Global Industry Report of UNIDO that they see knowledge as a key determinant of success. The knowledge stock of a people is not to be expanded quickly nor cheaply, and knowledge depreciates as that used in a poor society will not serve to operate the richer society to which it aspires. Friedman underestimates the importance of knowledge.

The Internet

The book treats the Internet as a magic carpet. Friedman did not seem to realize that the growth of the Internet would be most rapid among those who already had telephones and computers, and would slow down when people had to get one or the other for access. It slows down further when people have to hook up the electricity before they can plug in the computer and install the telephone, and further still when they have to build the road to lay the power lines before the electricity is available. There is a lot of the world still without electricity and telephones!

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Internet is a great thing. Just not quite as great as Friedman portrays it.

He writes glowingly about the growth of mobile phone access. I think that most of what is happening is that people with home and/or office phones are adding personal, mobile phones to the mix. Certainly wireless technology makes phone connections affordable to poor people who could not afford land lines to their villages, but the technology is not yet a panacea for connecting the poor.

Friedman does not address broadcast technology, but that is now transforming in developing nations as it was in the early 20th century in the United States and Europe.

Friedman seems to assume that once there is connectivity, there will be access, use, and benefit. He does not address the issue of content. Nor does he address the issues of reengineering and structural adjustment that are required to achieve the full benefits available from information and communication technologies.

Winner takes all and the elimination of poverty

There is an interesting discussion about the huge salaries that stars of the international media receive. Friedman extends the metaphor to companies and nation states without much thought. It seems easier to make a million selling one movie to a global audience than to make a million selling food to that same global audience, and Friedman does not seem to realize that there is a difference between goods were use by one person excludes use by another versus those goods that can be used by many without loss to any.

Divergence between the wealth of rich countries and that of poor countries has been the rule for two centuries. There was “club convergence” after World War II, when the countries that had been heavily damaged during the war rebuilt. A few countries have crossed the gap between poverty and prosperity – notably the Asian and Celtic Tigers.

I think that the citizens of all countries are increasingly realizing that good government, good institutions, and good policies count. There is hope that more countries will develop rapidly. But unfortunately the success of poor nations is less likely than Friedman appears to suggest.

An alternative view

I wonder whether it might be more useful to view regional development, and the interplay among great regions of the world:

· Europe is unifying economically and politically under a common market and the EU;
· The North American Free Trade Association is faced by huge disparities between Mexico and the Anglophone nations, and the United States faces the challenges as the sole world superpower combined with the need to reengineer its institutions and policies to continue its world economic leadership;
· The nations of the former Soviet Union are seeking to build new institutional frameworks, as well as new political and economic culture;
· The former satellites of the USSR are moving into the Western European block’
· China is embarked on a highly successful economic development, while seeking to adapt political institutions to its changing reality;
· India too is embarked on a successful economic path, and is also seeking to perfect its political institutions;
· Latin America, after a long hiatus of lackluster economic performance, is seeking new solutions to its economic problems and seems to be moving to the left politically;
· Africa is seeking to emerge from decades of economic stagnation, inept and corrupt governance, and a plethora of failed and almost failed states.
· The Islamic world is seeking to find an Islamic path.

I don’t think “globalization” as a conceptualization captures all of the richness of these paths.

"Capability building for catching-up: Historical, empirical and policy dimensions"

Summary: "IDR 2005, entitled Capability building for catching-up: Historical, empirical and policy dimensions, devotes a special section to assess lessons learned from catching-up experiences throughout modern history. From these experiences it draws a framework for operational policy analysis as well as a methodology for the assessment of capability building needs, thus filling a gap in the current understanding of economic development. The Report also includes a section monitoring and assessing global industrial trends, following the tradition of previous reports."

From the Executive Summary: "The Report provides a framework for operational policy analysis and a guide for the assessment of capability building needs to help overcome evident limitations in the current understanding of economic development. Thus, the Second Part of the Special Topic focuses on the interactions between the knowledge, business innovation and policy making subsystems, and addresses the policy capabilities needed to match the demand and supply of innovative resources – one of the most intractable problems still plaguing policymaking in the developing world. Two specific areas, standards and food safety, are explored to highlight these interactions and test the suggested policy analysis framework."

The Industrial Development Report is UNIDO's Flagship Publication. January, 2006.

Temporary Resolution of the US Funding Threats to UN

Read the full article by Thalif Deen published on January 9, 2996 on the Inter Press News Agency website.

Lead: "The United States, a major funder of the United Nations and its myriad agencies, has a longstanding notoriety for exercising its financial clout to threaten U.N. bodies refusing to play ball with Washington."

Excerpts from the article:

* Last month, the administration of President George W. Bush threatened to hold up the U.N. budget for 2006-2007 until and unless member states agreed to U.S.-inspired management reforms, including the appointment of a chief operating officer mandated to run the world body along the lines of a U.S. corporation. Since the overwhelming majority was opposed to some of the proposed reforms, the U.N.'s administrative and budgetary committee eventually agreed on a U.S.-proposed compromise: Secretary-General Kofi Annan was authorised to spend only 950 million dollars over a six-month period pending significant action on reforms, thereby emasculating the U.N.'s traditional biennium budget.

* Meanwhile, the Bush administration has withheld a total of about 127 million dollars -- a sum duly appropriated by the U.S. Congress -- from the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). In 2002, Washington cut 34 million dollars; in 2003, 25 million dollars; and in 2004 and 2005, 34 million dollars each. The cuts were prompted by a misconceived charge that UNFPA was supporting and promoting abortions in China -- a view strongly held by neo-conservatives and right wing Christian fundamentalists who are strong political supporters of Bush. "UNFPA does not support abortion, neither in China nor anywhere else in the world," a UNFPA spokesman told IPS.......

UNFPA executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid told reporters last week that more countries contributed to UNFPA in 2005 than in any year since its establishment in 1969: 171 donors compared to the 2004 record of 166. Contributions to the UNFPA regular resources last year were also the highest ever, increasing to some 350 million dollars, from the previous year's level of 322 million dollars.

When Does "Economic Man" Dominate Social Behavior?

Article by Colin F. Camerer1 and Ernst Fehr, Science, 6 January 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5757, pp. 47 - 52 (Subscription required.)

Abstract: The canonical model in economics considers people to be rational and self-regarding. However, much evidence challenges this view, raising the question of when "Economic Man" dominates the outcome of social interactions, and when bounded rationality or other-regarding preferences dominate. Here we show that strategic incentives are the key to answering this question. A minority of self-regarding individuals can trigger a "noncooperative" aggregate outcome if their behavior generates incentives for the majority of other-regarding individuals to mimic the minority's behavior. Likewise, a minority of other-regarding individuals can generate a "cooperative" aggregate outcome if their behavior generates incentives for a majority of self-regarding people to behave cooperatively. Similarly, in strategic games, aggregate outcomes can be either far from or close to Nash equilibrium if players with high degrees of strategic thinking mimic or erase the effects of others who do very little strategic thinking. Recently developed theories of other-regarding preferences and bounded rationality explain these findings and provide better predictions of actual aggregate behavior than does traditional economic theory.

This article is a tough read, but interesting. I have wondered for a long time why communities act in ways that appear more rational than one would expect when considering the decision making of individuals in the community. (Why do farming communities in developing countries often make choices on the crops to grow and the way to grow them that seem to be economically very rational, when the individual farmers have limited educations and don't seem to go about decision making based on economic calculations?) The article suggests some theory that would partially account for such behavior.

The article also might help understand how "trust" develops in communities. In many developing nations, corruption is rampant. In developed nations, markets work in part because people comply with obligations. The rule of law seems to explain only part of the difference. This analysis seems to suggest that small changes in the numbers of altruistic people who inforce compliance with obligations, and small differences in the costs of non-compliance can result in large changes in the stable operations of groups.

"Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate: Placing the United States on a Level Playing Field with China and India"

Downolad the report.

According to a Science magazine (Volume 311, Number 5757, Issue of 06 January 2006) Random Sample:

"A new study suggests that data used to bolster claims that the United States is losing its technological edge over other countries are off the mark.

"It has been widely quoted that the U.S. awards only 70,000 B.S. engineering degrees each year, whereas India churns out 350,000 and China 650,000.....But a group at Duke University group led by sociologist Gary Gereffi and high tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa suggests that any degree disparity may actually favor the U.S.

"After much legwork, the researchers obtained degree data from India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, China's Ministry of Education, and individual universities in both countries. The numbers, it turned out, include information technology and computer science degrees, as well as graduates of 2- and 3-year programs. When the researchers broadened the U.S. definition of engineering degrees accordingly, the U.S. total grew threefold, to 221,000 degrees. The group also found that India's figures double-counted many students and were based on estimated enrollments, suggesting that 215,000 would be more accurate.

"A revised per capita comparison gives the United States a considerable lead over both countries (see graphic, below). Gereffi says that the data don't change the fact that the United States should be concerned about its competitiveness. 'I'm not saying we don't have a problem," he says. "All we wanted to do is set the record straight.'"

Source: Science magazine

"Why Mosquitoes Trump Birds"

Subtitle: "Worried about avian flu? Never mind. What about yellow fever?" (Jack Woodall, The Scientist, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 61, 1/10/06.

There is a virus that has already mutated to pass from human to human, and it kills around half its victims. It causes yellow fever, and all it needs is the Aedes aegypti mosquito to achieve that.

This mosquito thrives in the humid tropics and subtropics. After being almost eradicated from the Americas by a hemispheric campaign, the A. aegypti mosquito has reappeared in many places along the Gulf coast of the United States, including Houston, Galveston, and New Orleans.

Aedes aegpti also carries the viruses for dengue. Where there's dengue transmission, yellow fever transmission also can occur; it just needs an infected human to arrive and set it off. Dengue is found in most of the capital cities of tropical countries

A human vaccine proven effective against yellow fever does exist; 10 days after getting your shot, you're protected for life. The vaccine is not widely used. It is available in the United States only at certain specified clinics, and for some, it's too much trouble or expense to get there.

A yellow fever epidemic in Galveston in 1867 killed 1,100 people; another epidemic could do so again. In 2005, 17,000 dengue cases were reported in Jakarta, more than 800 in New Delhi, 5,000 in Kuala Lumpur, and 13,000 in Singapore. Again, if dengue is present, yellow fever transmission can occur, too.

I realize that no one is going to take a blind bit of notice of what I've written here, because you're all suffering from information overload about bird flu (much of it wrong), and you can't take any more dire prophecies of doom and gloom. But I've written it anyway: Forget about bird flu, and lose sleep about Yellow Jack instead.

"UN plans bird flu alert system for North Africa"

Read the full article by Wagdy Sawahel on SciDev.Net. (5 January 2006)

"The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has approved plans to create an early warning system to alert North African countries of outbreaks of the deadly bird flu virus, H5N1.

"The plans, agreed on 24 December, will be implemented through the FAO's Technical Cooperation Programme and will cover Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

"The FAO has warned that migratory birds could bring the virus to Africa from parts of Asia and Eastern Europe where outbreaks have been reported."

MSNBC reports:

According to latest figures released by Turkish officials, 12 people have been confirmed as having contracted avian flu, while a further three, all children from the same family, succumbed to the virus last week.

Currently, there have been outbreaks of avian flu in wild and domestic poultry in 16 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, with one of the latest being Istanbul, the country’s most populous city.

Thus, the FAO initiative in North Africa seems very timely!

Gender Selection in India

Read the full BBC article (9 January 2006)

In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but in the year 2001 for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.

Researchers in India and Canada, publishing in the Lancet, report that prenatal selection and selective abortion may causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year. Their research was based on a national survey of 1.1m households in 1998.

They found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls. In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000. This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys. However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.

This from an earlier article (18 July, 2003) on the BBC website:

Medical research in India suggests that baby girls are much more likely to die than infant boys, even from illnesses that can be treated.The research, published in the British Medical Journal, was carried out at St Stephen's Hospital in Delhi......The researchers analysed autopsy reports of babies in three socially deprived parts of Delhi over a five-year period and discovered that the overall death rate for girls was almost one-third higher than that for boys. This was particularly the case for sudden, unexplained deaths - three out of four cases were girls. The researchers suggest that some of these deaths may be cases of parents actually killing their female babies.

These trends seems to be the result of Indian cultural tendencies to prefer male over female children, as well as of technological developments which enable families to determine the sex of the fetus and to terminate pregnancy.

I wonder, however, what the social results will be of a society with many more males than females, and with relatively few young women with older sisters? Apparently young men are already finding difficulties in finding marriage partners in some places in India.

I cite this as an case in which knowledge may be critical for development. Health programs, especially those designed by outsiders to benefit Indian populations, must have knowledge of these gender trends and apparent gender biases in the Indian population. Perhaps even more importantly, serious efforts should be undertaken now to project the social and economic consequences of these trends, and to consider alternatives to change the factors contributing to those trends.

Philanthopic Contributions in the United States

"Even before heavy donations spurred by the South Asia tsunami and the Gulf Coast hurricanes Americans' support for charities had grown steadily in the past half-century."

The Washington Post published this graph in conjunction with its article, "Despite Predictions, Charitable Donors Just Keep Giving" by Jacqueline L. Salmon (January 9, 2006). It's original source was Giving USA 2005 published by the Foundation Center.

U.S. Universities Summit on International Education

Go to the Summit webpages at the State Department's website.

The Summit was held January 5 through 9, 2006 at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. The Summit focus was on invigorating the U.S. government and higher education partnership on international higher education in the national interest. It was hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

The Summit was a forum on how to attract foreign students and scholars to the United States, as well as how to encourage more American students to receive part of their education abroad. In addition, participants were to discuss:

* marketing of U.S. higher education programs abroad,
* reaching out to underserved populations,
* understanding visa and regulatory processes,
* cooperating to meet exchange priorities, and
* utilizing fully the international education resources of community colleges.

The Summit also was intended to draw attention to the key investments required to strengthen international higher education for Americans, including increasing access to study abroad, encouraging non-traditional study abroad locations, strengthening non-traditional language acquisition, developing coherent international strategies at U.S. universities and colleges, and engaging the public and private sectors in a shared national vision for the future.

Remarks made by President Bush to the assembled university officials are available.

Summit attendees come from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and included those from leading public and private Ph.D. granting institutions, as well as community colleges, historically black institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, religiously affiliated institutions, and women’s colleges. Also invited were the principal presidential higher education associations and the heads of the federal science and humanities bodies.

The Summit was the venue for the announcement of a "National Security Language Initiative". The Initiative

"encompasses three broad things. One, to expand the number of Americans who are mastering critical need languages and start them at a younger age. And by younger age, it includes pilot projects to start them at the kindergarten level and work them up through elementary school, middle school, high school and colleges. And I can get into details about other such programs focusing on younger, younger students.

"Second, to increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages with the emphasis of critical needs languages. So think about a continuum. You already have some students who have been exposed to some of this language. How can we press in order to advance? How can we help them advance their mastery of this language? That's the second component.

"And the third component is teachers. Because it is not simply a matter that not enough Americans are learning these foreign languages; we don't have enough teachers to teach these foreign languages. We were struck by the fact, for example, that less than 2 percent of high school students in the United States combined today study Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Russian or Chinese. And so we need programs to help them study. We also need teachers to teach, to teach these critical languages."

Intellectual Property Rights and Traditional Knowledge

Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Folklore: Working in co-operation with UNESCO and other international organizations, and in dialogue with NGOs, The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provides a forum for international policy debate concerning the interplay between intellectual property (IP) and traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and traditional cultural expressions. WIPO is developing draft legal mechanisms and a range of practical tools aimed at enhancing the intellectual property interests of the holders of such knowledge, resources and expressions.

The Traditonal Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) proposes to document the knowledge covering Ayurveda that is available in the public domain by sifting and collating the information on traditional knowledge from the existing literature. The collection is to be published online in digitized format in five languages: English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish. Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC), an innovative structured classification system for the purpose of systematic arrangement, dissemination and retrieval has been evolved for the effort. TKDL is a collaborative project between The Indian National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) and Department of Indian System of Medicine and Homoeopathy (ISM&H), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. An inter-disciplinary team of 25 Ayurveda experts, 1 patent examiner, 5 IT experts, 3 NISCAIR scientists and 4 technical officers are in place at present for carrying out the work. TKDL seeks to "safeguard the sovereignty of this traditional knowledge" and to protect such knowledge from being misused by in patenting on non-original discoveries.

"Unhealthy Medicine: All Breakthrough, No Follow-Through"

Read the full essay by Steven H. Woolf in the Sunday Outlook section of The Washington Post. (January 8, 2006)

"We tend to view medical advances -- the breakthroughs that produce better medications, technology and procedures -- as the front line in the war on disease. They capture the media's attention; we marvel over the technological wizardry and the ingenuity of scientists; and to the afflicted, each advance gives hope of a cure. The federal government invests billions of dollars in this enterprise, and competition for better products drives the highly lucrative pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

"But the promise of a cure requires an additional step: Patients must receive the treatments promptly and properly. This step requires a well-functioning system to deliver care, which our country lacks. We spend far more money on inventing new treatments than on research into how to deliver them. Last year, Congress gave $29 billion to the National Institutes of Health, most of it to devise better treatments. The smaller federal agency responsible for solving problems with the delivery of health care, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) , received only $320 million. Starkly put, for every dollar Congress allocates to develop breakthrough treatments, it allocates one penny to ensure that Americans actually receive them."

"Courting the Web Giants"

"Google and Yahoo Draw Gadget Makers' Attention at Tech Show": article by By Yuki Noguchi and Greg Schneider, The Washington Post, January 7, 2006.

The 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (January 5-8) in Las Vegas has 1.6 million square feet of exhibition space and is attracting 2,500 exhibitors and 130,000 attendees from around the world. At the Show, Yahoo and Google (attending for the first time) are showcasing new services to deliver television programming to computers and cell phones, highlighting a tying together of services and devices. Reportedly, companies such as Intel Corp., Nokia Corp., Cingular Wireless LLC and media giants are "lining up for partnership deals to make sure they're part of that revolution."

"Studies Back Vaccines for Infant Diarrhea"

Read the full article by Justin Gillis in The Washington Post. (January 5, 2006)

Two new vaccines aimed at preventing childhood diarrhea caused by rotavirus could cut severe cases of that ailment in half if widely used. Rotavirus is a major cause of diarrheal dealth in poor countries. The results are due for publication today in the New England Journal of Medicine:

* Efficacy and Safety of a G1P[8] Rotavirus Vaccine
* Human–Bovine Reassortant Rotavirus Vaccine

The vaccines produced a strong immune response that kept many children from getting sick and protected others enough to keep them out of the hospital. And the studies -- which enrolled 131,263 children, the largest vaccine tests since the polio trials of the 1950s -- offered reassuring findings about the safety of the vaccines. That was a critical issue because a similar vaccine was withdrawn from the market six years ago after apparently injuring some children.

Julie L. Myers and Ellen R. Sauerbrey Appointed to Key Posts

Read the full article by Thomas B. Edsall in The Washington Post. (January 5, 2006)

"President Bush yesterday made a raft of controversial recess appointments, including Julie L. Myers to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau at the Department of Homeland Security, in a maneuver circumventing the need for approval by the Senate.

"Myers, a niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard B. Myers and the wife of the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, had been criticized by Republicans and Democrats who charged that she lacked experience in immigration matters."

A previous article by Dan Eggen and Spencer S. Hsu in The Washington Post (September 20, 2005) noted:

The Bush administration is seeking to appoint a lawyer with little immigration or customs experience to head the troubled law enforcement agency that handles those issues, prompting sharp criticism from some employee groups, immigration advocates and homeland security experts......Concerns over Myers, 36, were acute enough at a Senate hearing last week that lawmakers asked the nominee to detail during her testimony her postings and to account for her management experience. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) went so far as to tell Myers that her resume indicates she is not qualified for the job......After working as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y., for two years, Myers held a variety of jobs over the past four years at the White House and at the departments of Commerce, Justice and Treasury, though none involved managing a large bureaucracy.......Myers highlighted her year-long job as assistant secretary for export enforcement at Commerce, where she said she supervised 170 employees and a $25 million budget. ICE has more than 20,000 employees and a budget of approximately $4 billion. Its personnel investigate immigrant, drug and weapon smuggling, and illegal exports, among other responsibilities.

Read some outraged comments from the blogosphere:
* Daily Kos
* Michelle Malkin
* Debbie Schlussel
* Diggers Realm

Edsall also notes in his Washington Post article:

"The president avoided an abortion rights battle with the recess appointment of former Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate Ellen R. Sauerbrey as assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. Sauerbrey is an opponent of abortion rights."


Gwyneth K. Shaw writes in The Baltimore Sun (January 5, 2006):

The nomination of Sauerbrey, 68, to lead the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had languished in the Senate since Bush nominated her in September. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the nomination in October but put off a planned committee vote at the request of Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat.

Boxer expressed disappointment last night at Bush's decision to use his authority to fill the job using a so-called recess appointment, avoiding Senate confirmation while senators are taking a break.

Bush used the same power to install John R. Bolton as the ambassador to the United Nations after his confirmation was blocked in the Senate.

Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat who sharply questioned Sauerbrey during her hearing, said Bush should have let the Senate do its job. "I am disappointed that President Bush did not allow the Senate to complete its advise and consent role with a full evaluation and votes ... on the qualifications of Ellen Sauerbrey to this important position," Sarbanes said in a statement......

Some of those groups criticized her nomination as soon as it was announced. Liberal groups said she was a presidential crony and compared her to former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, whose nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was withdrawn.

Some also questioned whether her ardent opposition to abortion would affect the way the United States handles reproductive health issues involving international refugees.

Some of the blogosphere comments on this appointment:
* ModerateVoters.Org
* MaxSpeak
* Bring It On

Ellen R. Sauerbrey was described as follows at the Third World Congress of Families in March, 2004:

A Republican National Committeewoman and former Minority Leader of the Maryland House of Delegates. In 1994, Sauerbrey was the Republican nominee for Governor of Maryland, coming within four tenths of one percent of victory. Following the election, she became a radio talk-show host and a TV commentator. Her columns have appeared in the Washington Post, Washington Times, Baltimore Sun, and many other Maryland papers.

Arghh!!!!

The Precautionary Principle

Report of UNESCO's expert group on the Precautionary Principle, adopted by the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) at its fourth session (March 2005). Available in English and French.

Below I quote Annex 1. of the report in its entirety.

Practical guidance: frequent questions about the precautionary principle

What is the goal of the PP?

The goal of the PP is to protect humans and the environment against uncertain risks of human action by means of pre-damage control (anticipatory measures). The PP provides a rational approach to the satisfactory and ethically justified management of uncertain risks to public health, society or environment. It aims to use the best of the ‘systems sciences’ of complex processes to make wiser decisions. The PP is to supplement, but not necessarily replace, other management strategies that fall short of being able to handle large-scale scientific uncertainty and ignorance: ‘When human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm’.

What conditions trigger the consideration of the PP?

Generally speaking, the PP applies when there is plausible evidence of possible harm but scientific uncertainty and ignorance makes it impossible to reliably quantify and characterize the risks. More specifically, one needs to check whether:
* there exist considerable scientific uncertainties or even ignorance about the anticipated harm;
* there exist scenarios (or models) of possible harm that are scientifically reasonable (that is, based on some scientifi cally plausible reasoning);
* it is currently impossible to reduce the uncertainties without at the same time increasing ignorance of other relevant factors by higher levels of abstraction and idealization;
* the potential harm is indeed sufficiently serious or even irreversible for present or future generations or otherwise morally unacceptable;
* there is a need to act now, since effective counter-action later will be made significantly more difficult or costly at any later time.

What actions are consistent with the PP?

The PP calls for measures that either are likely to prevent the possible harm from occurring or are likely to contain or reduce the possible harm should it occur. In principle, there will always be a range of possible strategies that would satisfy this requirement. One may impose certain constraints on the range of such measures. One may, for example, require that the actions be:
(a) non-discriminatory in their application, i.e. similar situations are treated similarly,
(b) consistent in scope and nature with comparable measures from equivalent areas,
(c) proportional to the chosen level of protection and the scope of the harm,
(d) chosen with due consideration of positive and negative consequences (including non-monetary costs and benefits) and with an assessment of the moral implications of both action and inaction,
(e) subject to continuous review and monitoring, and that the main burden of providing evidence for safety rests on the proposers of a new technology or activity.
Even under these conditions a variety of possible precautionary actions may remain, ranging from simple restrictions upon a practice, strengthening the resilience of the system, the development of effective controlling (remediating) technologies, to a total ban of the activity. The final choice will always be value-based.

Who decides on the PP?
What is an appropriate decision procedure?

Since the application of the PP involves the explicit consideration of values that are affected by it, since values differ in society, the processes leading up to a final choice of action should be largely participatory and inclusive. The cultural plurality in risk attitudes varying from risk-aversion to willingness to take risks implies that the question of how society ought to deal with risks can only be answered in public debate – a debate in which people will necessarily discuss their perception of risks and risk management from different points of view and different conceptual and ethical frameworks. Only if decisions can acquire some robustness in terms of social and political acceptability do they stand a chance of being effective over time.

What makes a reasonable ground for concern?

A mere fantasy or crude speculation that an activity or new technology causes harm is not enough to trigger the PP. Grounds for concern that can trigger the PP are limited to those concerns that are plausible or scientifi cally tenable (that is, not easily refuted). Some form of scientific analysis is mandatory. The hypothesis that an activity can cause harm should be consistent with background knowledge and theories. If a hypothesis requires one to reject widely accepted scientifi c theories and facts, then it is not plausible. The hypothesis should posit causal mechanisms or processes, or if no causal mechanism is known, there should be some evidence of a possible statistical correlation. However, if a hypothesis posits radically new and unfamiliar mechanisms and processes, it is not plausible. Further, obscure and complex hypotheses are not as plausible as simple and straightforward ones.

Under what conditions is the PP not the best way to go?

Generally speaking, there are three classes of cases where the PP should not be used. The first class is when the scientific uncertainties can be overcome in the short term through more research, or when the uncertainties are simply understood as low probability of harm (in that case it is only a question of the chosen level of protection). However, in some cases the potential consequences can be of a nature and magnitude that makes them morally unacceptable even if the probability is very low, for instance, extinction of mankind. The second class is when the potential harm is not morally unacceptable, e.g. when the harm is restricted to individuals who voluntarily engage in the activity and are informed about the possible consequences. The third class of cases is when the harm is reversible and it is likely that effective counter-action is not becoming more diffi cult or costly, even when one waits until the fi rst manifestations of the harm eventually occur. In this case a ‘wait and see’ strategy might be used.

Some say that the PP does not provide clear guidance/is not a good administrative principle. Is that a problem?

The PP provides a rational framework for managing uncertain risks. However, the PP
in itself is not a decision algorithm and thus cannot guarantee consistency between cases. Just as in legal court cases, each case will be somewhat different, having its own facts, uncertainties, circumstances, and decision-makers, and the element of judgement cannot be eliminated. In this respect it resembles other ethical and legal principles. Principles of law constitute important tools for crystallization of new concepts and values. A strength of the PP being a principle is its open-endedness and fl exibility, which creates a possibility and an incentive for social learning. Different areas of application and different legal frameworks may lead to more specific guidance and regulations. The repeated use of State practice and consistent opinio juris are likely to transform the PP into a customary norm. Among the principles emanating from international declarations, the PP is legally relevant and cannot be disregarded by the countries in the international order, nor by legislators, policy makers and courts in the internal sphere. Precautionary measures should in any case be judged transparently on a case-by-case basis, and be subjected to scrutiny from many parties.

"Sorry, but AIDS Testing Is Critical"

Read all of Richard Holbrooke's opinion piece in The Washington Post of January 4, 2006.

Excerpts:

* Of the 12,000 people who will be infected in the next 24 hours around the world, over 90 percent will not learn they are sick until roughly 2013, when they develop full-blown AIDS. Meanwhile, not knowing their status, they will unintentionally spread it to other people over the next eight years, and these people will spread it to still more, and so on.

* I suggested that current strategies are clearly not working, especially on prevention. While continuing to support increased funding for treatment of those who already have AIDS, I argued that far more emphasis should be put on detection and testing so that people learn their status and then, with counseling, change their behavior if they are HIV-positive, thus reducing the spread of the HIV virus.

"Prevention Is Key to Avian or Seasonal Flu"

Read the full set of Q's and A's with Susan J. Blumenthal in The Washington Post. (January 4, 2006)

Your speeches are alarming. Is that intentional?

Somewhat. If you give candid information, people make good decisions. But we also want it to be a wake-up call. People know they should eat right, exercise, get out of the way of a hurricane, but we don't always do those things. We know we shouldn't smoke, yet one out of five people do. It took Katrina and seeing some of the failures in not having state, federal and local preparedness not being coordinated to serve as a wake-up call to the concern of pandemic flu.

Are we prepared?

We're not sufficiently prepared if a pandemic were to strike us this year. We have a plan that outlines the major steps to be taken. Hopefully we'll have the time to develop new vaccines and stockpile antivirals. We don't have [the necessary] communications systems in place. We don't have a rapid diagnostic tool for using in the field, there is no cell-based vaccine nor the production systems that would be needed. . . . But we can't forget the [pandemics] that are currently with us.

Such as?

Forty million people worldwide are infected with the AIDS virus; 3 million die each year. One million children die of measles each year because they don't get a 70-cent vaccine. . . . In the United States, we have the highest infant mortality rate of the industrialized world. We spend twice as much as any other nation on health care, and we rank 18th in life expectancy and 35th in overall health status.

"Roche grants Tamiflu sub-license to India's Hetero Drugs"

Read the full story on OneWorld South Asia.

Roche has granted a sub-license to the Indian company Hetero Drugs for the production of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), as part of continued efforts to increase and speed up availability of the medicine for influenza pandemic planning world wide. The agreement with Hetero is focused on providing oseltamivir for government pandemic use and will have an immediate effect on the availability in India and developing countries both directly and through further agreements with local companies, states a Roche release.

Light Up The World Foundation

Foundation Project
in Sri Lanka
Check out this great technology for rural areas of developing nations.

This Foundation is helping NGOs install lighting based on Light Emitting Diodes.

Technical advances have greatly improved the quality and reliability of LEDs since they were invented in the 1960s, making them much brighter and more efficient. The late 1990s brought high-brightness LEDs that could shine continuously for 100,000 hours, or 30 to 40 years in normal service. The first LEDs emitted light only at pure wavelengths or colours – blues, greens, yellows, oranges or reds – they were unsuitable for domestic lighting. The high-brightness white LED that emitts at all visible wavelengths to produce white light is a relatively new development......

The LUTW Luxeon lights can be utilized in a number of different applications and the most appropriate solution is dependent on the overall needs, budget and type of installation.The energy sources for LUTW's home lighting projects have included Person Powered Pedal Generators, Pico Hydro and Pico Wind Turbines and Solar Photovoltaic.

The Christian Science Monitor has published an article describing a project in India using LEDs with solar photovoltaic power.

WHO Handbook for Journalists: Influenza Pandemic

Download the full PDF file with the 2005 World Health Organization Handbook.

Unfortunately, no one is able to accurately predict whether H5N1 will actually trigger a pandemic--and if it does, we have no idea how long it might last or how deadly the virus will be. As a global public health organization, WHO has a responsibility to alert the international community when it appears that the world is moving closer to a pandemic. It may be years before a pandemic hits the world, and it may ultimately be sparked by a virus other than H5N1. While WHO recognizes that openly talking about a pandemic threat may raise concerns worldwide, we would not be fulfilling our public health mandate if we were not to warn the world of this evolving threat.

"How to Avoid A Virus Infection" to your PC

Read the Washington Post's suggestions of December 30, 2005.

In addition to downloading updates for Windows and other Microsoft software you might have, update your security software (often), and run security sweeps using that software.

Free anti-virus software programs are available for download, including AntiVir, Grisoft's AVG Free, or AVAST.

Free anti-spyware programs are available from Microsoft, AdAware SE Personal, and Spybot Search & Destroy.

Visit washingtonpost.com/securityfix for step-by-step instructions on how to reduce the threat by disabling certain Windows features.

I use Firefox as my browser, with the hope that it is more secure than other browsers.

Kevin Sitss in the Hot Zone

Go the the Yahoo! website for Kevin Sites' Hot Zone.

Kevin Sites is spending a year covering every major global conflict as Yahoo!'s first news correspondent. As a solo journalist ("SoJo"), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports. He is supported by a three-person, Los Angeles-based editorial team. This website carries his reports. It also provides links with background information on the countries and conflicts that he is reporting. Sites spent the previous five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks.

This is an interesting website for its content. Sites is a good reporter, covering riviting news.

The initiative is also important as a new departure, in which a web company is providing high class coverage of important events and situations that don't make it to the evening television news, nor indeed to most newspapers. It would be great to see more use of the Internet to get this kind of news to those of us who want it and seek to make use of it!

"Superfluous Medical Studies Called Into Question"

Read the full article by David Brown in The Washington Post of January 2, 2006.

Professional medical practice is almost certainly the human endeavor most thoroughly based on strong scientific evidence. Case control studies showing safety, efficacy and effectiveness are required for licensing of new drugs and vaccines, and are common for medical practices. Peer review and replication of studies are common. Laws exist to further insure the quality of scientific practice, and meta-analyses are done in many cases to combine the results from studies and further increase certainty of the interpretation of their findings.

This article, however, cites two recent studies indicating that too much replication may be taking place. "One article examined 18 years of research on aprotinin, a drug used to reduce bleeding during heart surgery. The other looked at studies on the relationship between a baby's sleeping position and sudden infant death syndrome. Both concluded that research on these subjects went on long after the answers were known -- namely, that aprotinin worked and that babies sleeping on their backs were less likely to die of SIDS."

The odyssey of aprotinin, which is derived from the lung tissue of cows, was recounted in the journal Clinical Trials. Dean Fergusson and his colleagues at the Ottawa Health Research Institute found 64 randomized, controlled trials -- the most authoritative type of study -- on the use of aprotinin in heart surgery. They were done in half a dozen countries over 18 years, starting in 1987. Two-thirds were little more than variations on each other. And nearly all showed the same thing: Patients who received aprotinin during surgery bled less. They had only one-third the chance of needing a blood transfusion of patients who did not get the drug. What was surprising was that this advantage was clear by June 1992, after the 12th of the 64 studies.

In the International Journal of Epidemiology, Ruth Gilbert of the Institute of Child Health in London examined 40 studies of SIDS and sleep position going back to 1965. Gilbert found that if researchers had pooled the results of the oldest studies and analyzed them, they might have gotten a big hint by 1970 that putting babies to sleep on their stomachs raised the risk of SIDS. Instead, that observation did not become convincing until the late 1980s.

Delaying changes in medical practice awaiting unnecessary further replications of research seems likely to cause unnecessary suffering, and in some cases excess disability and death. Giving less than optimum treatment to controls in medical experiments raises ethical issues. Fortunately, the article suggests that medical journals are increasingly requiring better reviews of the state-of-the-art and meta-analyses for new publications, and fortunately there are efforts under way to make the results of medical research more widely available to other researchers (and to the medical profession and the general public).

Other professions could learn from the medical profession to use knowledge more effectively for their contributions to social and economic development, and perhaps take the lead in using timely meta-analysis of research results both to improve the quality of knowledge, and to avoid inappropriate delays in emboding research results in their practice.

"In India, Engineering Success"

Read the full article by Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post of January 2, 2006.

The explosion of technical schools all across India, "is part of India's technology-fueled economic miracle. In 2005 India produced 200,000 engineering graduates, about three times as many as the United States and twice as many as all of Europe. But the really astonishing statistic is this: In 2005 India enrolled fully 450,000 students in four-year engineering courses, meaning that its output of engineers will more than double by 2009........What's made this engineering takeoff possible is not an increase in the supply of universities financed by taxpayers or foreign donors; it's an increase in demand for education from fee-paying students -- a demand to which entrepreneurs naturally respond. More than four out of five Indian engineering students attend private colleges, whose potential growth seems limitless."

Stomach Bug Mutates Into Medical Mystery

Read the article by Rob Stein in the Washington Post of December 30, 2005.

A severly pathogenic strain of Clostridium difficile appears to be spreading rapidly around the United States and causing unusually severe, sometimes fatal illness. "'This may well be another consequence of our use of antibiotics,' said John G. Bartlett, an infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 'It's another example of an organism that all of a sudden has gotten a lot meaner and nastier.'..........The infection usually hits people who are taking antibiotics for other reasons, but a handful of cases have been reported among people who were taking nothing, another unexpected and troubling turn in the germ's behavior.

The infection has long been common in hospital patients taking antibiotics. As the drugs kill off other bacteria in the digestive system, the C. diff microbe can proliferate. It spreads easily through contact with contaminated people, clothing or surfaces. There are no national statistics, but the number of infections in hospitals appears to have doubled from 2000 to 2003 and there may be as many as 500,000 cases each year, McDonald said. Other estimates put the number in the millions."

"AMERICANS LIKELY TO BECOME HUMAN GUINEA PIGS"

Read the whole article from the Center for Justice and Democracy website.

"THE DRUG INDUSTRY ALREADY BENEFITS FROM LIABILITY PROTECTION FOR PRODUCTION OF SEASONAL FLU VACCINES AND OTHER CHILDHOOD VACCINES

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (enacted under the Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986) provides drug manufacturers protection from lawsuits arising out of injuries caused by vaccination, forcing injured victims into an administrative compensation program8 The Program covers the major childhood vaccines as well as the seasonal flu vaccine (this was added in 2004).9

* As of 2001, 75 percent of claims were denied.10
* Many of these claims are denied after long and contentious legal battles taking an average of 7 years to be resolved.11
* Attorneys are less likely to take on vaccine injury cases due to these bureaucratic and political hurdles.12
* The Fund is designed so that the Department of Health and Human Services may unilaterally tighten the restrictions on claimants. In 1995, DHHS changed the burdens of proof so drastically that claims went from being paid in one out of three cases to one out of seven.13"

----------------
"8 42 USC § 300 aa-1, table can be found on-line at http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/vicp/table.htm

9 Fact Sheet, Flu Vaccine Crisis: The Role of Liability Concerns, Office of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, October 18, 2004.

10 Elizabeth C. Scott, 'The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act Turns Fifteen,' 56 Food Drug L.J. 351 (2001)

11Ibid.

12 24 J. Health Pol. Pol’y & L. 82.

13 Statement of the National Vaccine Information Center Co-Founder & President, Barbara Loe Fisher, September 28, 1999, House Oversight Hearing, 'Compensating Vaccine Injury: Are Reforms Needed?'"

Update: Drug Companies Immunity For Bird Flu Drug and Vaccine Production

Read "Senate Passes Last Minute Bill Giving Drug Companies Immunity From Deaths And Adverse Reactions Caused By Vaccines And Drugs Used For Bird Flu" by Kristin Keckeisen in Crusador eAlerts (12/23/05).

I recently posted a description of the exceptional protection for industry provided by the flu pandemic provisions of the Defense Appropriations Bill. This is an update by Kristin Keckeisen I found on the Internet:

In the final hours just before adjourning for the year, the Senate last night passed the Defense Appropriations bill that contained the pandemic flu preparedness provisions, including outrageous immunity protection for drug companies.......

What passed last night as part of the defense bill is not responsible. In fact, and sadly, it even includes a shield for reckless misconduct in some cases.

Even more outrageous than the substance of these provisions, if that's possible, is how these provisions were slipped into the conference report at midnight on Sunday. After many Senators and House members had already signed the conference report, Majority Leader Frist and Speaker Hastert privately conspired with the White House to add wholly new language containing the liability protections to the conference report.......

with the help of Senate friends such as Senator Ted Kennedy, we succeeded in defeating cloture on the Defense Appropriations Conference Report.

In the end, the Frist-Hastert language survived due to the politics surrounding the must-pass nature of the defense spending bill, combined with the rush to get home for holidays.

The Christian Science Monitor provides this update:

Another provision, granting immunity from liability to manufacturers of flu vaccine, was added at the last minute to the FY 2006 Defense Appropriations bill. Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who sponsored the measure, says that "appropriate, targeted liability protections" are needed to reestablish a manufacturing base in the US for vaccines. "A pandemic will occur," he says.

After protests from citizens' groups, a previous attempt by Senator Frist to add such a provision was repealed. But last week, Frist, with the approval of House GOP leaders, added the provision back to the Defense bill.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts dubbed the move "a massive Christmas bonus to the drug companies at the expense of nurses, firefighters, and ordinary Americans who will have to take untested vaccines and drugs and get no money for compensation if they are injured."

"The Flu Hunter"

Read the full article by Michael Rosenwald in Smithsonian. (January 2006)

Summary:

For years, Robert Webster has been warning of a global influenza outbreak. Now governments worldwide are finally listening to him

Robert Webster is the world's preeminent expert on avian influenza. A virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, he helped create the first widespread commercial flu vaccine decades ago. It was Webster who discovered that birds were likely responsible for past flu pandemics, including the one in Asia in 1957 that killed about two million people. Perhaps Webster's greatest contribution to science is the idea that global influenza epidemics begin when avian and human flu viruses combine to form a new strain, one that people lack the ability to fight off.

For all those reasons, Webster is in great demand as governments worldwide try to stave off a possible epidemic of influenza, the likes of which haven't been seen since the great pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed at least 40 million people. Smithsonian dispatched Michael Rosenwald to catch up with Webster and report on the scientist whom one expert has called an "international treasure."

Excerpts:

“Will the H5N1 currently circulating in Vietnam learn to transmit, reproduce, from human to human? Why hasn’t it done so already? It’s had three years to learn how, and so what’s it waiting for? Why can’t it finish the job? We hope it doesn’t.” He paused. “Is it the pig that’s missing in the story?”

(Webster's) lab at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis is the world’s only laboratory that studies the human-animal interface of influenza. It was Webster who discovered that birds were likely responsible for past flu pandemics, including the one in Asia in 1957 that killed about two million people.

It occurred to Webster that there was a problem. The problem was H5N1. Neither he nor any members of his staff had ever been exposed to the virus strain, meaning they did
not have any antibodies to it, meaning they had no defense against it. If they became infected, they would likely meet the same fate as the little boy who died.

They needed a vaccine. Four decades before, Webster had helped create the first widespread commercial flu vaccine. Until he came along, flu vaccines were given whole—the entire virus was inactivated and then injected. This caused numerous side effects, some of which were worse than the flu. Webster and his colleagues had the idea to break up the virus with detergents, so that only the immunity-producing particles need be injected to spur an immune response. Most standard flu shots still work like this today.

Before they went to work in Hong Kong, Webster and his colleagues created a sort of crude vaccine from a sample containing the H5N1 virus. They declined to discuss the matter in detail, but they treated the sample to inactivate the virus. Webster arranged for a pathologist in Hong Kong to drip the vaccine into his nose and the noses of his staff. In theory, an tibodies to the virus would soon form.

“Are you sure this is inactivated?” the pathologist said.
Webster pondered the question for a moment.
“Yes it is. I hope.”
And the fluid began dripping.

"Breaking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck Through Conversational Knowledge Management"

Read the paper by Christian Wagner in the Information Resoures Management Journal (IRMJ) via Knowledge Board. (January-March 2006)

"Much of today's organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people's heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach."

Happy Holidays!

Irvine Park's Christmas Village.
130_3097
Originally uploaded by iamjunko.

"Critics Say Flu Bill Overprotects Drug Industry"

"They say provisions added to the pandemic legislation would shield firms from liability." Read the full article by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in the Los Angeles Times. (December 20, 2005)

"Bird flu preparedness legislation headed for a final vote in the Senate this week would create loopholes that critics said would allow vaccine makers to avoid legal liability even if a patient were harmed by negligence.

"Democrats and the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America derided the provisions Monday as a gift to the drug industry. Supporters of the legal exemption said the lawyers were acting in their own self-interest, but a leading public health group also criticized the liability language......

"The liability provisions are contained in a mammoth defense spending bill that would provide $3.8 billion of President Bush's $7-billion request for pandemic preparedness.

"'Washington Republicans tucked a huge Christmas present for the drug companies into the appropriations bill in the dead of night,' said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles). 'The liability shield can be granted to any product used to prevent or treat an epidemic or a pandemic, and the [administration] gets to decide what that means.'.......

"Manufacturers of drugs designated to deal with the emergency would be shielded from lawsuits unless they had engaged in "willful misconduct." Such a threshold is so high it would protect companies that were negligent or reckless, critics said......

"Although the legislation would create a compensation program for patients injured by pandemic vaccines, it allocates no money for the fund. That would be determined according to the need in an emergency, supporters of the bill said.

"Some critics said the language was so broad that it could allow the secretary of Health and Human Services to declare an emergency for any serious health problem facing the country, such as obesity or diabetes. The bill specifies that the secretary's decision could not be challenged in any federal or state court."

"UPDATE 2-U.S. House passes $453.3 billion defense bill" (Reuters, December 22, 2005.)

"The defense spending bill also contains nearly $3.8 billion to begin preparations for a possible avian flu pandemic.

"The Bush administration had sought more than $7 billion to stockpile drugs and take other steps in case the deadly animal illness mutates in a way that makes it easily transmissible to humans.

"Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, attacked a provision that House and Senate Republican leaders inserted into the bill giving drug companies protection from lawsuits.

"Obey, who said he would support narrow protections for manufacturers of avian flu vaccines, criticized the provision he said provides 'all sorts of insulation for pharmaceutical companies, not just drugs to deal with the flu, but a far broader range of products.'

"The avian flu money would also be used to increase international surveillance of the disease and help state and local authorities in the United States prepare."

"Bush planned bill-signings next week of a massive defense bill." (Mary Dalrymple, Associated Press via the Boston Globe, December 24, 2005.)

The Defense Appropriations Law should soon be available on this website, so you can read for yourself the final version.

Evidence & Policy

A journal of research, debate and practice

"Evidence & Policy is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to comprehensive and critical treatment of the relationship between research evidence and the concerns of policy makers and practitioners. International in scope and interdisciplinary in focus, it addresses the needs of those who provide public services, and those who provide the research base for evaluation and development across a wide range of social and public policy issues – from social care to education, from public health to criminal justice."

This journal is relatively expensive, but provides free online access to people working in member institutions. One issue is available free online.

"China overtakes U.S. as world’s leading exporter of information technology goods"

Source: OECD
Read the full report on the OECD website.

"China overtook the United States in 2004 to become the world’s leading exporter of information and communications technology (ICT) goods such as mobile phones, laptop computers and digital cameras, according to OECD data.

"China exported USD 180 billion worth of ICT goods in 2004, compared with U.S. exports in the same category valued at USD 149 billion. In 2003, the U.S. led with exports of ICT goods worth USD 137 billion, followed by China with USD 123 billion.

"China’s share of total world trade in ICT goods, including both imports and exports, rose to USD 329 billion in 2004, up from USD 234 billion in 2003 and USD 35 billion in 1996. By comparison, the U.S. share of total world trade stood at USD 375 billion in 2004, USD 301 billion in 2003 and USD 230 billion in 1996."

Scientific Integrity in Policy Making: Investigation of the Bush administration's abuse of science

Go to the Union of Concerned Scientists website on Scientific Integrity.

"On February 18, 2004, 62 preeminent scientists including Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, former senior advisers to administrations of both parties, numerous members of the National Academy of Sciences, and other well-known researchers released a statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making. In this statement, the scientists charged the Bush administration with widespread and unprecedented 'manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions'

"The scientists’ statement made brief reference to specific cases that illustrate this pattern of behavior. In conjunction with the statement, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released detailed documentation backing up the scientists’ charges in its report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making: Further investigation of the Bush administration's abuse of science.

"Regrettably, The Bush administration has continued to undermine the integrity of science in policy making seemingly unchecked. To document new incidents that surfaced since the report's release, UCS released a second report titled Scientific Integrity in Policy Making: Further investigation of the Bush administration's abuse of science. Read selected cases from the two reports."

"INDIAN SCIENCE: Booming Computer Sector Seen as a Mixed Blessing"

Read the full news article by Pallava Bagla in Science. 16 December 2005. (Subscription required.)

"India cemented its claim to leadership in information technology (IT) last week when three U.S. companies--Microsoft, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)--announced plans to spend nearly $6 billion on research and manufacturing here over the next few years. The economy will benefit, but some scientists are concerned that the IT bonanza could drain talent away from basic research......

"According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in New Delhi, Indian software and services exports grew more than 34% from 2004 to 2005, earning revenues of $17.2 billion over a 12-month period......

"Although the IT sector is booming, some leaders fear that its rapid growth could hurt other areas of research. Astrophysicist Rajesh Kochhar, former director of the National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies in New Delhi, says: 'There can be no doubt that information technology is acting as a brain sink.' New entrants in the Indian IT sector are paid roughly three times as much as entry-level scientists, he says. The result, he argues, is that 'highly qualified engineers are doing stupid, repetitive work.' Echoing this view, aeronautics engineer Gangan Prathap, chief of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore, says foreign investments like those announced this week could "seduce" Indians into becoming 'a nation of techno-coolies.' He claims that academic centers already must 'scrounge at the bottom of the barrel" for talent.'"

"U.S. COMPETITIVENESS: Summit Lists Ways--but Not Means--to Strengthen Science"

Read the full news article by Jeffrey Mervis in Science. 16 December 2005. (Subscription required.)

The National Summit on Competitiveness, a 1-day meeting hosted by the Department of Commerce, was held in Washington early in December. The website is worth visiting, with its statement and with a bibliography of recent reports on innovation.

Science reports:

"The group's series of recommendations......include more federal spending on basic research and set-asides for high-risk research, a doubling over the next 10 years of the number of undergraduates earning science and engineering degrees, changes in immigration laws to make it easier for foreign-born graduates to remain in the United States, and greater support for advanced manufacturing technologies......Participants made no attempt to rank the importance of those recommendations, for instance. 'There are no priorities for essentials, and these are all essential.'"