The Graphing Calculator Story

Google TechTalks August 1, 2006 Ron Avitzur ABSTRACT It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation. For more info visit: http://www.pacifict.com/Story This is another test, of the simplicity of posting a video from (in this case Google Video) to my blog. However, this is an interesting ICT-history talk.

Testing a link to youTube.com

National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery

Black and White Jumping Spider from the collection.

The U.S. National Science Foundation provides this website with a large number of downloadable

* Images (1211)
* Videos (70)
* Audios (248)

and more. This is a rich body of resources on science and active scientific research.

I especially like the Nanoscience screen saver (for computers).

"Search Me? Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. Publishers Say Read the Fine Print First."

Read the full article by Bob Thompson, The Washington Post, August 13, 2006.

This article describes Google's plans to create the greatest digital library the world has ever seen, and its current effort to digitize the nine million books in the library of Stanford University. Already, Google's engineers have developed sophisticated technology for the purpose.

"When Google announced the library scanning project, in December 2004, it had four library partners besides Stanford. Two of them (Oxford University and the New York Public Library) took a legally cautious approach to digitization, permitting Google to copy only public domain works. A third, the University of Michigan, took the opposite view, asserting forcefully that Google could scan every one of its 7 million books. Harvard hedged its bets, initially agreeing only to a limited test program. Last week, the University of California signed on as a sixth Google partner. Its scanning program will include both public domain and copyrighted material."

In September 2005,

"the Authors Guild filed a class action suit against Google, seeking statutory damages and an injunction to halt the scanning. A month later, five major publishers -- McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons -- sued as well, with the support of the AAP" (Association of American Publishers".

Because whole books or even whole pages are not displayed, Google's supporters argue that

"making copyrighted books searchable is the kind of 'transformative use' permitted under copyright law. The publishers and the Authors Guild completely disagree, arguing that Google's unlicensed creation and retention of digital copies -- as well as its creation of additional copies for the libraries -- are illegal."

The Global Pandemic Initiative

Lead: " IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, today announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases." The press release continues: "With growing concerns over potential outbreaks of new strains of disease, and their ability to spread more easily because of modern transportation, IBM scientists have formed a steering committee with worldwide health organizations and universities to guide efforts to address the issue. Together, they will explore the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness program for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world." IBM, 15 May 2006

IBM Press room - 2006-05-15 IBM, Public Health Groups Form Global Pandemic Initiative - United States

IBM Press room - 2006-05-15 IBM, Public Health Groups Form Global Pandemic Initiative - United States

IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in May announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases.

The press release stated:

With growing concerns over potential outbreaks of new strains of disease, and their ability to spread more easily because of modern transportation, IBM scientists have formed a steering committee with worldwide health organizations and universities to guide efforts to address the issue. Together, they will explore the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness program for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world.

The Economist this week commented that The Global Pandemic Initiative

is a collaboration between the WHO and the CDC, together with IBM, a large computer firm, and over a dozen other groups. It is intended to develop “the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness programme for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks.” One approach IBM hopes to take is to develop software that will help predict how diseases might spread.

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)

GPHIN is a secure, Internet-based "early warning" system that gathers preliminary reports of public health significance in seven languages on a real-time, 24/7 basis. GPHIN gathers and disseminates relevant information on disease outbreaks and other public health events by monitoring global media sources such as news wires and web sites. The information is filtered for relevancy by an automated process, and then analyzed by Public Health Agency of Canada GPHIN officials. The output is categorized and made accessible to users. Notifications about public health events that may have serious public health consequences are immediately forwarded to users. According to the Economist magazine, "Sun Microsystems, Google and several big Silicon Valley venture-capital funds and investors. They are helping to develop a new “web crawler” that will expand GPHIN to track newspapers and internet blogs in 40 to 100 languages."

Literacy in the United States

There is an article in the current Scientific American (September 2006) by Rodger Doyle on the results of a study of literacy in the United States. It divides literacy into three types:
· Prose Literacy (The skills needed to comprehend and use information from continuous texts such as newspaper articles.)
· Document Literacy (The knowledge and skills needed to comprehend and use information from noncontinuous texts such as simple statistical tables.)
· Quantitative Literacy (The knowledge and skills needed to identify and perform computations using numbers embedded in printed materials such as tax forms. Examples: calculating a tip or loan rate.

The study showed that prose and document literacy were decreasing slightly for the total population, but that quantitative literacy was increasing, based on the difference in performance measured in the survey in 1992 and 2003. However the results were worse for high school graduates, college graduates and those with graduate degrees than for the population as a whole. Not only did prose and document literacy decrease notably for all three groups, but quantitative literacy decreased quite a bit for college graduates and those with graduate degrees. Sad news/

It occurred to me to post on the interpretation of this data. How can overall changes in literacy look better than the changes in literacy for high school, college and graduate school graduates? It is possible, for example, that the remaining population (e.g. non high school graduates) did much better on the tests in 2003 than in 1992.

Perhaps more likely that people were getting more education in 2003 than in 1992. Since it is likely that high school grads are more literate than those who don’t graduate from high school, that college grads are more literate than high school grads who don’t graduate from college, and that people with graduate degrees are more literate than college grads without graduate degrees, increasing education levels in the population might account for performance of the total population appearing better than performance for any of the subpopulations with specific levels of education.

Indeed, if the cohorts of people completing each level of education are increasing as a percentage of the overall population, I would expect literacy levels to decrease at each level of education. Those who would have dropped out of school in the past because they were having trouble, would be more likely to stay involved;

The article references two studies:

· A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century
· The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective

Arden L. Bement on International Science

Arden L. Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation

"On the international scale, our value will be measured by our global research networks and our partnerships with fast-growing research economies. On the West Coast, you are in an excellent position to collaborate with Asian nations in biology, chemistry, physics, and materials science." Arden Bement at Harvey Mudd College, January 14, 2006.

Dr. Bement has demonstrated a strong interest in international scientific cooperation, and given that the National Science Board has a task force in operation on International Science to advise the NSF, it seems useful to consider his statements on the topic. Here are links to some recent talks that he has given:

* "International Cooperation, The Future of Science and Engineering" (May 25, 2006, National Natural Science Foundation of China 20th Anniversary Celebration, Beijing, China)
* "Collaboration and Competition: What Can Governments Do?" (May 15, 2006, G8 Heads of Research Councils Meeting, Paris, France)
* "Crossing Borders to Advance the Frontier: NSF's Role in International Outreach" (April 22, 2006, American Physical Society Meeting, Dallas, Texas)
* "Global Connections: National Science Foundation International Programs and Activities" (June 22, 2005Remarks, Global Conference of Environment, Science, Technology and Health Officers, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC)

Workshop - Enhancing the Effectiveness of Sustainability Partnerships: Addressing the Challenge of Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainability

Workshop - Enhancing the Effectiveness of Sustainability Partnerships: Addressing the Challenge of Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainability: "The Task Force on Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainable Development is organizing a workshop for August 30-31, 2006 at the Jonsson Center in Woods Hole, MA to explore the emerging role of public-private partnerships in addressing the challenges to harnessing science and technology for sustainable development."

International Task Force on Global Public Goods - gpgtaskforce.org

International Task Force on Global Public Goods - gpgtaskforce.org: "The International Task Force on Global Public Goods was created through an agreement between France and Sweden signed on 9 April 2003. The Task Force's mandate is to assess and prioritize international public goods, global and regional, and make recommendations to policy makers and other stakeholders on how to improve and expand their provision."

More on the NSB Task Force on International Science

(This posting is an update on my earlier posting on the Task Force.)

I attended the meeting of the Task Force on Tuesday, August 9. This was a very brief meeting, which spent most of its time inducting new members to the Task Force and reviewing the draft report of the March Roundtable held by the Task Force. That report focused on:

The rationale for U.S. government interest in international science and engineering
* The challenges of increasing international cooperation in science and engineering
* Global engagement in science and engineering
* New modes for participation in international science and engineering

The Task Force will complement its Roundtable Discussion on International Science Partnerships with additional meetings:

* In Singapore in late September to be held in conjunction with the 31st Meeting of the Industrial Science and Technology Working Group of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation organization.
* Informal meetings in the Middle East later this year
* A meeting in Europe in the Spring of 2007 in conjunction with a meeting of European Ministers of Science.

The Task Force is to complete its report to the President in the Summer of 2007. I expect the report to be made public, and to strongly recommend new initiatives to improve international scientific cooperation.

Science and Technology in the Era of Globalization

UNU/UNESCO International Conference
23 & 24 August 2006

This conference provides a forum for exploring how we can better, and more directly, harness scientific and technological progress for the promotion of peace and sustainable development.

It covers such salient issues as access to knowledge and benefit-sharing, the scope of intellectual property protection, and the ethical boundaries of scientific enquiry, with the aim of delineating the parameters within which societies can utilize the processes of globalization to foster the creation and diffusion of knowledge for the benefit of all.

In the public symposium on 23 August, eminent experts from around the world review the ways in which globalization is changing science and technology, and vice-versa, and assess the opportunities that these changes offer.

In the workshop on 24 August, panellists discuss how science and technology link with, and contribute to, economic and social development in four fundamental areas — knowledge-sharing, trade and technology transfer, society and policy-making, and science and technology education for sustainable development — and how globalization is influencing these processes.

The U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series

The U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series invites world leaders to speak on the role of the United Nations in addressing the challenges facing the world's peoples and nations in the twenty-first century. It is co-sponsored by the United Nations University (UNU) Centre, the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) and the Science Council of Japan (SCJ).

Past lectures are webcast. The website includes brief bios of the speakers. Speakers include:

* Shirin Ebadi (2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner) "Women in Nation Building"
* Peter Doherty (1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine) Science, Society and the Challenge of the Future
* Jimmy Carter "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa"
* Ahmed H. Zewail (1999 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa" and
* Norman E. Borlaug (1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner) "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa"

Mohammad Khatami (Former President of Iran) is to speak on August 25th on "Dialogue Among Civilizations: A Necessity for Living in Peace and Non-Violence, Bridging the Development Gap among Nations, and Building a Global Citizenship"

Heritage Health Index Selected Data

Heritage Health Index Selected Data: "Heritage Health Index data on the condition of natural science collections was recently presented at the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and Natural Science Collections Alliance in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The majority of the U.S.’s 820 million zoological, botanical, geological, paleontological, and paleobotany specimens are held in what Heritage Preservation has classified as “science museums” and “archaeological repositories or scientific research collections,” which include government agencies or universities that would not be classified as museums. Science museums include natural history museums, science technology museums, planetariums, and the non-living collections at nature centers, arboretums, botanical gardens, aquariums, and zoos."

Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land - Google Video

Two friends independently sent me the link to this video, which is about ah hour and a quarter long. A third friend said he had seen it, and that it drew attention to the failures of U.S. media to adequately inform the public about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It certainly does make that case. (It does not make the case that this failure is only one aspect of a massive failure of the media here, but I think such a case can be made.)

The video is far more on the side of the Palestinians that we are used to seeing. I don't know whether it is more or less fair that the media coverage it reproaches. But it is riviting video.

For this blog, I would underline one point that the video makes very well -- what we think we know is based on the information we receive. Part of the difference between European and U.S. public opinion on the wars in the Middle East is surely due to the very different coverage of those wars by European and U.S. media.

For U.S. chovenists, let me underline a point made in the film. Brittish journalists are far more aggressive in questioning their on-air sources than are U.S. journalists, and the difference is important. I think it clear that Brittish journalism is superior to ours in this respect.

The film makes what should be an obvious point, that various factions work hard to influence the content of the media, and that not all do so with equal success. Unfortunately, the most successful need not be those who are most accurate and balanced in their reporting.

One suggestion that I would make is that we all try to access media from different countries. I wish that more U.S. citizens could do so in languages other than English. I am pleased that more kids are studying abroad, since they will have the opportunity to use foreign media, and may learn to value the alternative viewpoint those media provide.

I suggest that the video might also help to be a little more humble in evaluating what we think we know!

National Science Board Task Force on International Science

In September 2001, the Board released a report entitled, Towards a More Effective Role for the U.S. Government in International Science and Engineering (NSB-01-187). Many of the recommendations from that report remain valid, but are largely unfulfilled. Since the time this report was prepared, there have also been considerable shifts in the international landscape. These shifts, along with the unfulfilled recommendations of the 2001 report, have been judged to warrant a careful reexamination of the role of the U.S. Government in international S&E.

Thus the National Science Board has organized a Task Force on International Science to address the many changes that have occurred in the global S&E dynamics related to research, education, politics, and technical workforce.

The Task Force held its first Hearing and Roundtable Discussion on International Science Partnerships on Thursday, May 11, 2006. This one-day event was co-hosted by the Center for International Science & Technology Policy, and took place at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C. A final agenda for that meeting is available here.

The next meeting of the Task Force is to be held on Wednesday, August 9, 2006. It will be held in Room 1235 of the National Science Foundation building from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.. (4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22230, USA) This meeting is part of the more general meeting of the National Science Board taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Acting Executive Secretary of the Task Force is: Clara A. Englert cenglert@nsf.gov
(703) 292-7000

Higher Education in Developing Nations

I have long thought that donor agencies under-fund higher education in developing nations. I think a part of the problem is that the economic analysis of the benefits of high education has been seriously flawed. The ones I have seen have focused on returns to the graduates, and on the efficiency of the educational process itself.

Of course, if students take forever to get through third rate schools, only to find that they can’t get jobs when the graduate, and leave for greener pastures in other countries as soon as they can, it makes little sense to throw good money after bad. Economic analysis can illuminate such problems.

Of course, it is important and useful to study the stream of income received by people according to the education that they have received, and to figure out things like the present value of the increment in future earnings per unit of additional education.

However, projecting such calculations into the future is perilous. Take the example of Ireland. For many years it provided university education to its youth, only to see a large number of the graduates emigrate abroad. Many were concerned that the national investment in education was bearing inadequate returns. However, when new government policies and entry to the European Common Market encouraged foreign direct investment in Ireland, lots of jobs were created. Not only did new graduates remain in the country, but increasing numbers of emigrants returned. The returns to higher education suddenly looked much better.

It is hard for economists to document the benefits to society that come from higher education when those are not captured in the incomes of the graduates, but I think those external benefits can be extremely important. The economic impacts of trying to run a nation with too few teachers, engineers, and doctors are very severe.

The returns to educational expenses for the creation of the cadres of such professionals are highly non-linear. I would predict that the rate of return is likely to be low when the number is below some critical mass, and then to increase. Thus as the number of engineers gets to the point where they can manage the building, operation and maintenance of an adequate infrastructure well, the returns per engineer entering into the workforce are high. (Of course, this assumes that the overall national policy environment is conducive to the growth and efficient operation of that infrastructure.) However, training more professionals that will be usefully employed in their professional occupations quickly becomes a losing proposition.

In these circumstances, good economic analysis requires that not only that the average return to investment be calculated, but the marginal returns to additional investments in training different kinds of professionals – a very difficult analytical task!

The Science-Based Professions

Readers of this blog know that I am very much concerned with the development of the science-based applied professions in developing nations. These include medicine and engineering, but also professions in areas like agriculture, forestry, mining, and meteorology.

It has not escaped policy makers that it is more expensive to train people for such professions than it is to train people in the liberal arts. It seems to have escaped many of them that the returns from training adequate numbers of such people are also quite high, and those returns justify the educational investment.

The Management Professions

It would seem that in the last decade or two, an increasing number of people have come to recognize the benefits of university training for the cadre of people needed to manage an economy. This training includes training in business management, public administration, health service administration, educational administration, etc. It also includes training in ancillary areas from accounting to information systems.

Without people to efficiently and effectively manage large organizations, societies can’t modernize. Higher education has a demonstrated capacity to train large numbers of managers to high standards quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, some countries have also managed to demonstrate how to use higher education badly for this purpose.

Nation Building

I spent time in Uganda and Kazakhstan this summer. Both are multi-ethnic societies involved in nation building after the collapse of empire states. The experience has made me think more about the role of higher education in nation building.

I once heard someone say that part of the problem with Idi Amin was that he was very poorly educated. I suspect that is true, and that one of the problems of post-colonial countries is that they don’t have cadres of political leaders who have been educated to the appropriate standards for leading a nation. Jared Diamond says something similar in “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”. He suggests that the European societies, that used books extensively, had leaders with wide knowledge and understanding of political precedents, and were consequently able to outmaneuver the societies in Africa, Oceana, and the Americas that did not use books in the same way.

As I understand it, nationalism in the 19th century focused on nations as communities of people with a common language and common culture. It emphasized the nation-state, in which the borders of the political state were coterminous with the geographic extent of the one-language, one-culture community. That is a model that is difficult to apply in either Uganda or Kazakhstan, or indeed in many parts of the world.

The United States, in contrast has been a “nation of immigrants”. Nationalism here has included many different ethnic groups, with many different cultural backgrounds, who at least on arrival spoke many different languages. The melting pot assimilated these immigrants, helping them learn English, making their cultures more accepting of others, encouraging them to internalize U.S. political culture, and imbuing them with nationalistic fervor for the United States.

The U.S. public educational system was a critical element in this nation building, and I suspect that the higher education system was a keystone element. We still struggle in this country with integrating our ethnically diverse population, and with accommodating the continuing influx of immigrants into the core national civic culture, and we do so at a time when the information infrastructure and institutions are changing rapidly. It is not clear we will continue to succeed, even as well as we did in the past. Still, U.S. mass public education, including mass university education is an important model.

Again, I am not sure how the economists deal with the nation building aspects of education and higher education, but I fear that they tend to leave them as unmeasured externalities, and thus to leave them out of the sight and out of the minds of policy makers.

Conclusion

Higher education is too important to economic, political and social development to be underfunded. It is also too important to be done badly, and where the quality or efficiency of higher education is too low to justify investments in education per se, serious consideration should be given to investing in reform.

The World Is Calling

The World Is Calling: "The number of students receiving college credit abroad keeps rising. During the past 20 years, it has nearly tripled, to about 175,000 in the 2003-04 academic year, the last year for which statistics are available."

Subtitle: "Area College Students Join Those Hitting the Books Overseas in Record Numbers"

By Susan Kinzie, The Washington Post, August 8, 2006.

"Why do economists spend valuable time blogging?"

Read the full article in The Economist of August 3, 2006 (subscription required).

Like most bloggers, I think that question would only be asked by an old fogy. I suppose that the Economist is a special kind of old fogy -- one that thinks people only do things for financial rewards. The answer: I suppose economists spend time blogging because they can and they want to.

The article identifies some very interesting blogs done by economists:

* Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal
* The Becker-Posner Blog
* Greg Mankiw's Blog
^ Brad Setser's Web Log

"Advocates Say U.S. Bars Many Academics"

Read the full article by Anushka Asthana in The Washington Post, August 4, 2006.

Subtitle: "Government Says It Rarely Uses Law Regarding Those Who 'Espoused Terrorism'"

This article implies that a growing number of foreign scholars have had visas have been revoked or visa applications denied becaues of their ideological or political views. It illustrates the situation using the cases of:

* Waskar Ari (A Bolivian Aymara Indian seeking to take up his professorship at the University of Nebraska after completing his PhD in the U.S.)
* Yoannis Milios (a professor from Greece, who was detained and interrogated about his politics for several hours at JFK Airport before his visa was revoked.)
* Dora Maria Téllez (A Nicaraguan who gave up a post at Harvard University after the government rejected her visa application.)
* Tariq Ramadan (a prominent Swiss Islamic scholar whose visa was revoked.)

A spokesperson for the American Association of University Professors said that the says "the problem is growing. 'This places a serious chill on the exercise of academic freedom.'"

"The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking up to 15 cases.......in which it thinks people have been banned for their beliefs. While ideology is rarely given as the official reason, the ACLU said academics increasingly are being interrogated about their political beliefs when they apply for visas."

The article concludes:

If the United States is excluding visa applicants based on ideology, there will be ramifications, said Robert M. O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

"It is not just the people who are turned down," he said. "If there are a number of sensitive and conscientious people who decide it is not worth coming at all and decide to go to another country, then we in the U.S. are the losers."

White House Records On Plan B Pill Sought

From today's Washington Post:

Government lawyers are fighting a reproductive rights group's request for copies of White House e-mails and other records about the morning-after contraceptive known as Plan B...........

The center is seeking to determine whether the administration, for political purposes, tried to steer FDA regulators on how to handle a request to allow over-the-counter sales of the pills. The group supports such sales.

"Plan A: Approve Plan B"

Read the full editorial in today's Washington Post, subtitled "It's past time for the FDA to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception."

Readers of this blog already know that politics seems to have overruled science in the deliberations of the Food and Drug Administration about the "morning after pill". The Washington Post editorializes today, occassioned by the Congressional hearing on the nomination of a new chief of the FDA, including the following:

FUNNY HOW a confirmation hearing can prod the Food and Drug Administration into action. Almost-action, that is. The FDA has been dithering for more than three years about whether to allow the Plan B emergency contraceptive to be sold without a prescription, as it is in 45 countries and nine states. Now it may be, finally, on the verge of permitting such sales to those 18 and older, a move that could help prevent enormous numbers of unintended pregnancies every year. Or this could be just another FDA gambit, dangling the prospect of action in hopes of getting the acting commissioner confirmed -- and overcoming the threat of Democratic senators to hold up the nomination until there is a decision. We hope it's the former.......

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, on the eve of his own confirmation hearing this week, announced that he was junking the rulemaking and planned to talk to the manufacturer about how to make an 18-and-over restriction work. Given that retailers routinely require ID for selling alcohol and cigarettes, that should not be too difficult.

This could be good news -- or yet another feint. As Mr. von Eschenbach's letter ominously concluded, "If . . . we conclude that the . . . program isn't sufficiently rigorous" to prevent the over-the-counter product from being used by young girls, "Plan B will remain Rx-only for women of all ages."

That would be a shame. Making emergency contraception widely available could prevent up to 1.5 million unintended pregnancies and 600,000 abortions a year in the United States. Plan A for the FDA should be making Plan B available over the counter.

House of Reps Hot About Global Warming!

More Denial: "OVER THE PAST two weeks, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee has held a pair of truly senseless hearings on global climate change. The purpose was not to figure out how to cut carbon emissions. It wasn't even to discuss the science of global climate change in general. Instead, the purpose was to pick at a single study of global temperature patterns, the so-called 'hockey stick' graph -- a trend line that purports to show a sudden and dramatic increase in global temperatures in the 1990s and therefore looks like a hockey stick. The graph is hardly central to the modern debate over climate change. Yet the subcommittee has investigated the scientists who dared produce it and hounded them for information. Now that a study of the graph by the National Academy of Sciences has largely backed up the hockey stick findings, the committee has been holding hearings to attack it some more.......

The reality is that nobody knows how bad global warming will be; responsible estimates vary from manageable to catastrophic. So the prudent move is to take action now as a kind of insurance policy. Yes, reducing carbon emissions substantially is a daunting prospect given American and world dependence on fossil fuels -- so daunting that it induces a kind of denial in many people. But it is a particularly ugly kind of denial that leads a congressional committee to spend this kind of energy attacking scientists, instead of confronting the problems their data suggest."

Thanks to SciDev.Net for soliciting my opinion!

Read "Warning over South's lack of nanotech regulations" by Sophie Hebden, SciDev.Net, 1 August 2006.

Nature and Science magazines provided a real service when they helped create this fine online magazine which brings news of science and technology developments of importance to the Third World to a global audience.

"Senators Prod FDA Nominee On Politicization of Agency"

Read the full article by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post, August 2, 2006.

Acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach testified before the Senate committee considering his confirmation yesterday. Apparently the members focused heavily on the "agency's flagging reputation and its snail's-pace review of the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B."

On Monday, von Eschenbach's announced that the agency is reviving a stalled effort to make Plan B available without a prescription. The article notes that "no case before the FDA has been subject to more political controversy than that of Plan B, a mix of contraceptives that can block pregnancy when taken within 72 hours of intercourse. In December 2003, an expert panel voted overwhelmingly in favor of allowing the drug -- long sold by prescription -- to be offered over the counter. But the agency has yet to make a final decision."

More generally, "more than 100 whistle-blower cases are pending at the agency, Mikulski noted -- an outgrowth, she said, of rock-bottom morale, much of it rooted in the perception that the Bush administration is imposing ideology over evidence.

"Several senators cited a recent survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists in which more than 40 percent of nearly 1,000 FDA employees said they knew of cases in which political appointees had interfered with agency decisions."

Women are indeed getting better looking!

Read "Perfect 10s and the Odds of a Pink Nursery" by Richard Morin in The Washington Post, August 2, 2006.

According to a recent research study:

Good-looking parents are 36 percent more likely to give birth to a girl than less-attractive couples -- which also explains why women are, on average, better looking than men......

Data (was) collected during in-home interviews with 2,972 randomly selected young adults in 2001 and 2002. All were parents 18 to 28 years old, and they participated in the ongoing National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. As part of the study, the interviewer rated the respondent's physical attractiveness on a five-point scale that ranged from "very unattractive" to "very attractive.".....

(The researchers) found that 56 percent of babies born to beautiful parents were girls. For parents in each of the other categories, fewer than half of the babies -- 48 percent -- were girls.

Why are beautiful people more likely to have girls?.....Scientists studying humans and other species have found that parents who possess any heritable trait that increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success will have more males than female babies, and vice versa.

Because men value physical attractiveness more than women do when looking for a mate, good looks increase the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons. So attractive people should have more daughters -- which is exactly what Kanazawa found.

His theory also suggests that, over time, women should have become more attractive than men. These data confirmed his hunch. More than half of all women in the sample -- 52 percent -- were rated as "attractive" or "very attractive," compared with 42 percent of the men.

Bird Flu Continues To Be Difficult to Spread

Read the full article in the "Findings" section of today's Washington Post.

Lead:

Scientists failed in multiple attempts to make a more contagious form of the H5N1 bird flu, suggesting the virus may have to undergo massive change to cause a human pandemic.

After genes from human and bird influenzas were mixed to mimic a natural process that could lead to a pandemic, the virus remained hard to spread, said researchers led by Taronna Maines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The article also states:

CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding said: "This does not mean that H5N1 can't develop into a pandemic strain. We are far from out of the woods."

Also yesterday, Pennsylvania-based Novavax Inc. said it made the first experimental vaccine targeting the strain of avian flu that is spreading in Indonesia

Quotation: What is literal truth?

The way people defined literal truth said much about a culture.

Robert D. Kaplan
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucuses
(page 285)

Following Brain Research May Help Us Think Better

Read the full article "How the Brain Helps Partisans Admit No Gray" by Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post of July 31, 2006.

"Psychological experiments in recent years have shown that people are not evenhanded when they process information, even though they believe they are.......When talking heads provide opinions after the debate, partisans regularly feel the people with whom they agree are making careful, reasoned arguments, whereas the people they disagree with sound like they have cloth for brains.......

"When Republicans saw Kerry (or Democrats saw Bush) there was increased activation in brain areas called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is near the temple, and the anterior cingulate cortex, which is in the middle of the head. Both these regions are involved in regulating emotions.......More straightforwardly, Republicans and Democrats also showed activation in two other brain areas involved in negative emotion, the insula and the temporal pole. It makes perfect sense, of course, why partisans would feel negatively about the candidate they dislike, but what explains the activation of the cognitive regulatory system?

"Turns out, rather than turning down their negative feelings as they might do with the fallen ice cream, partisans turn up their negative emotional response when they see a photo of the opposing candidate, said Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"In other words, without knowing it themselves, the partisans were jealously guarding against anything that might lower their antagonism. Turning up negative feelings, of course, is a good way to make sure your antagonism stays strong and healthy......

"The result reflects a larger phenomenon in which people routinely discount information that threatens their preexisting beliefs, said Emory University psychologist Drew Westen, who has conducted brain-scan experiments that show partisans swiftly spot hypocrisy and inconsistencies -- but only in the opposing candidate.

"When presented with evidence showing the flaws of their candidate, the same brain regions that Kaplan studied lighted up -- only this time partisans were unconsciously turning down feelings of aversion and unpleasantness.

"'The brain was trying to find a solution that would get rid of the distress and absolve the candidate of doing something slimy,' Westen said. 'They would twirl the emotional kaleidoscope until it gave them a picture that was comfortable.'"

Knowing that the brain tends to reject information that goes against our political beliefs, and to accept that which confirms our prejudices, we would be well advised to bring reason to bear on our emotional response to what we see in the media!

Meanwhile, Back on Earth

Meanwhile, Back on Earth: "IN A MOVE AKIN to Dan Quayle invoking John F. Kennedy in 1988, President Bush attempted a Kennedyesque moment of his own 2 1/2 years ago when he called for a national effort to land Americans on the moon and Mars. It's not a clip they'll play on repeat in Mr. Bush's presidential library.

To few people's surprise, the president's soaring pronouncements flopped. But he still pushed NASA to carry on planning for new solar-system exploration. Now instead of just being an embarrassment for the president, Mr. Bush's astronautical ambitions are cutting deeply into NASA's budget to, among other things, monitor global climate change."

The Washington Post editorial today also notes:

According to the space agency, NASA is diverting a little over $3 billion from its science research budget over five years. Though it's not clear how much of that will come from earth science, NASA admits that the climate-monitoring funding has steadily decreased since fiscal year 2004.

While Al Gore is raising public consciousness about the environmental crisis with his great film, An Inconvenient Truth, the Bush Administration is cutting back on the research needed to better understand The Climate Crisis.

See the movie, which is already the fourth best selling documentary in history.

Another Failure in the Wake of 9/11

The Doha Round of trade negotiations was started soon after 9/11. It was recognized by many leaders in many countries that the grinding poverty in much of the world and the obvious injustice of the global economic system were contributory factors to the anger that fueled terrorists and international terrorism. Many also realized that poor people in poor nations could improve their economic lot if they had freer access to the markets in rich nations. The trade in agricultural and other labor intensive products is constrained by tariffs (especially those by European countries) and by subsidies (notably by U.S. agricultural subsidies). The Doha Round offered to help developing countries to help themselves by leveling the playing field, and thus indirectly to reduce the pressures encouraging international terrorism.

In contrast to many of the other post-9/11 initiatives, this appeared to be an initiative in which all countries would benefit. Freer trade would produce significant increases in overall global production and efficiency, and appropriate negotiations would allow these benefits to be shared by all nations.

It now appears that the Doha Round has failed. It must be assumed that it did so because the negotiators didn't do a good enough job at their work. The U.S. negotiators were one of the "eight hundred pound gorillas" at the table, and must share a significant portion of the blame!

Lets remember that in the next elections!

Read the article in the current Economist about the failure of the Doha Round. (Subscription required.)

The Bologna Declaration and Process

The Ministers of Education of the European nations made a joint declaration in 1999, calling for harmonization of higher education systems of the continent. The purpose was to facilitate university graduates' mobility in the region, and further to allow students in institutions of higher education to change schools more easily. Of course, there must also have been a hope that there would also be resultant improvements in the quality, efficiency and/or effectiveness of higher education. Their product is referred to as the Bologna Declaration because of the venue of their meeting. Click here for an explanation of the Bologna Declaration.

The Bologna process then was created for the European higher education area to harmonize academic degree standards and quality assurance standards throughout Europe. The basic framework adopted under the process is of three cycles of higher education qualification: bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. In most cases, these will take 3, 2, and 3 years respectively to complete, but the framework is moving to defining qualifications in terms of learning outcomes.

There is a Bologna Secretariat in the United Kingdom, which seeks to provide information and news about developments in the Bologna Process and about how the work program will be taken forward.

A stocktaking in 2005 suggests that significant progress is being made in the harmonization.

Check out the Wikipedia entry for the Bologna Process.

UNESCO Resources for Those Who Wish to Study Abroad

The book, "Study Abroad", is UNESCO's international guide to higher-education study opportunities and scholarships offered by higher education institutions and international organizations in over 145 countries. It includes some 3,000 entries on courses and scholarships in different higher-education academic and professional disciplines. There is information on: addresses (including Internet sites), admission requirements, application deadlines, financial aid, fees, living expenses and other topics. Entries are presented in English, French or Spanish according to the language of the country concerned.

UNESCO's online "Study Abroad Database" contains some 3,000 opportunities for post-secondary studies in all academic and professional fields in 147 countries and territories for the years 2005 and 2006.

UNESCO International Conventions on the Recognition of Qualifications in Higher Education

There are six regional conventions on the recognition of qualifications (Africa, Arab States, Asia and Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and two European conventions) and one interregional convention (Mediterranean Convention).

UNESCO conventions are aimed at promoting the recognition of academic qualifications for academic purposes (e.g. to continue studies in a different institution). Nevertheless, the conventions sometimes hold a ‘de facto’ and ‘de jure’ role in recognizing diplomas for professional purposes (e.g. to get a job). It is important to check with the different conventions.

NSF InfoBrief via CRA Bulletin: Decline in Foreign Student Registrations

CRA Bulletin ? NSF InfoBrief: "For the third year in a row, there was a drop in the number of first-time, full-time enrollments of foreign graduate students. Between 2003 and 2004, their number dropped over 7%, to 27,486. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of first-time, full-time foreign students fell nearly 20%. First-time, full-time graduate enrollments of US citizens and permanent residents also declined by about 1% in 2004, after having increased 29% over the previous three years."

Some UNESCO Higher Education Initiatives

The UNESCO Higher Education Open and Distance Learning Knowledge Base

The Open and Distance Learning (ODL) Knowledge Base project was set up to support decision makers and practitioners with ready access to information and tools that will assist them in more effective policy planning, development and management of ODL in higher education programmes. It provides Web-based knowledge base regional resources for:

* Africa
* Asia and the Pacific and
* CIS/Baltic countries.

It also provides an Inter-Regional Decision Support Tool to assist decision makers to make first-level assessments about the viability and quality of distance education programs. The International Internet Forum on the Higher Education Open and Distance Learning Knowledge Base (HEODLKB) Project is also linked to this website.

Mega Universities

A dozen or so Mega Universities (each of which has an enrolment in excess of 100,000 learners per year) utilize a combination of media to accommodate learners. U.S. Mega Universities include:

* City College of San Francisco
* University of Maryland University College and
* University of Phoenix

This UNESCO website provides links to Mega Universities in developing nations, including:

* Allama Iqbal Open University (Pakistan)
* Bangladesh Open University
* China Central Radio & TV University
* Indira Gandhi National Open University (India)
* Indonesian Open Learning University
* Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
* Payame Noor University (Iran)
* Korea National Open University
* Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (Thailand)
* University of South Africa
* Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
* Shanghai TV University

The site also provides a link to the World Summit of Mega Universities held 23-25 September 2005.

Intellectual Property Rights, Biotechnology And Developing Nations

By the term “biotechnology” I am referring to the applications of modern microbiology to develop technologies. The term would include genomics, proteomics, recombinant DNA technologies, etc.

How can biotechnology help us to reduce the burden of disease? How can it increase food and agricultural production? There are other applications, including waste processing, environmental reclamation, mineral beneficiation, biomass conversion, and other industrial processes. However, let me focus on health, food and agriculture.

In a global perspective, the burden of disease falls most heavily on poor people, and those people are concentrated in developing nations. Similarly, the most pressing needs to increase food and agricultural productivity are found in meeting the food and economic needs of poor people in developing nations. Thus I believe the priority applications of biotechnology should be to meet critical needs of poor people in developing nations.

Key Technologies

In the health field, we look to biotechnology to contribute to the development of new diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutic pharmaceuticals. Other health applications exist, such as in the control of disease vectors. The biotechnology involved can be applied to animal as well as human health, and thus can benefit productivity of livestock.

In agriculture, we also look to biotechnology for development of improved crops (including the creation of genetically modified crop varieties). There are also applications in crop disease control, reducing post harvest losses, and biological nitrogen fixation. There is a significant field of application of biotechnology to food processing.

Scientific Research versus Technology Development

For convenience, one can distinguish between:

· Fundamental science, the results of which are generally published in scientific journals and become common property;
· Applied research, which involves the application of scientific methods to solve practical problems, and which may result in public goods or privately held intellectual property;
· Technology development, which includes the development of new products or processes.

A linear model of progression from fundamental science to applied research and then to technology development and commercialization was once widely used. However, most recognize that the processes involved are more complex than implied by the linear model, and that there is a complex interplay between fundamental and applied research and technology development.

Comparative Advantage

Economists have long known that countries should produce goods and services for which they have comparative advantage. They should trade the surplus production with other countries to obtain the additional goods and services that they need. If the system of international commerce works correctly, the patterns of production match the patterns of comparative advantage, and every country does better through specialization and trade than it would by closing its borders and producing solely for domestic markets.

Biotechnology, as described above, is a new field. As far as I know, the first study of research priorities in biotechnology for developing nations was done by the National Academy of Sciences in 1982. However, biotechnology capacity is developing rapidly in many countries. Thus the pattern of comparative advantage in biotechnology is evolving. However, I suggest that we can understand some aspects of that evolution, and make some useful suggestions as to where efforts in building biotechnology capacity are likely to be useful.

Of course, if international transactions are too expensive (due for example to the cost of transportation), then countries can’t exploit their comparative advantages through trade. The improvement of information infrastructure and the reduction of transportation costs have radically increased the variety of goods and services that can be traded profitably, and globalization has resulted. Thus not only is the capacity to do biotechnology evolving, but the costs of international transactions in biotechnology are also changing rapidly.

As an aside, let me remind you of the difference between “competitive advantage” and “comparative advantage”. Competitive advantage refers to the advantage that a country obtains by producing some product at a lower cost or with higher quality than others can produce that product. Comparative advantage in contrast depends on the ratios of production costs for products in different countries. When the ratios are different, two countries can both prosper by trading the products they produce with more comparative efficiency for those they produce with less comparative efficiency. Of course, countries tend to have a comparative advantage in producing those products for which they have the greatest competitive advantage.

A recent report by RAND illustrates the complexity of the factors that combine to create the competitive advantage. In general, the report finds that richer countries, with more advanced scientific and technological capacities, enjoy competitive advantages in high technologies, including biotechnology.

The experience of the various tigers suggests that building competitive advantage in high technology areas is a long process. Highly qualified human resources are needed, and it takes time to build a system to educate and train the scientists and technicians needed; those trained before they can be utilized in their fields leave. Clusters effects from the multitude of firms that are involved in producing high tech products and supporting the producing firms take a long time to evolve. Institutional development also takes time.

The Geography of Comparative Advantage

It was once assumed that comparative advantage came largely from natural resources, while today it is often assumed that it derives from knowledge resources. In the case of biotechnology, comparative advantage is also based on facilities and institutions.

New crop varieties must be developed under the conditions similar to those in which they will be grown, and thus there is a comparative advantage for at least part of the product development to be done in developing countries. So too must new vaccines and drugs be tested in the populations they are to serve, against the local varieties of the diseases. Here too, there is a comparative advantage for part of the research and development process to be completed in developing countries.

On the other hand, fundamental research is best done where there is strong funding for such efforts, as well as a strong cadre of researchers, well-established research teams, well-equipped laboratories and good scientific libraries. Thus there is a comparative advantage for parts of the biotechnology R&D enterprise to be conducted in scientifically-advanced, developed nations.

Specific pharmaceutical firms and specific agro-industries have technological expertise developed from decades of experience in biotechnology and related industrial processes, suites of relevant intellectual property rights, and linkages with firms providing complementary inputs (in biotechnology clusters). These factors together also create comparative advantages in parts of the biotechnology R&D process.

Still another part of the biotechnology R&D network are the research intensive universities, which not only carry out part of the R&D, but which train the people needed in the other R&D laboratories. These too are a geographically localized resource, mostly occurring in scientifically-advanced countries.

I would suggest a key problem is the articulation among the organizations carrying out these different biotechnology R&D functions. Most obviously, the critical capacities located in developed countries are not adequately brought to bear on the priority problems centered in less developed nations.

How to Improve the Situation

Clearly a mixed solution is required, combining many factors.

Some governments and foundations are subsidizing researchers doing upstream biotechnology research in ways that encourage them to focus on topics relevant to global priority concerns. The innovations by the Gates Foundation illustrate the power of this approach. Linkages between such researchers and corporations with downstream development capabilities have been improved by changes in policy and laws. Efforts have been made to assure market demand for commercial biotech products in developing countries. Such efforts appear important, and I think they should be continued.

Foreign direct investment in agro-biotech and pharmaceutical industries in developing countries seems to me a critical ingredient that should be stimulated and enhanced. Not only does FDI provide needed capital for the expansion of biotechnology capacity, but it enhances technology transfer to the developing world for those many techniques dominated by industrial firms.

Developing countries should create first the biotech R&D capacity to field test new medications and vaccines, to adapt new crop varieties to local conditions, and to produce products for local and regional markets. From this base, they may well expand into other areas of biotechnology capacity. Thus did the newly industrialized countries often start with simple technological functions in the information and communications technology field, and move upstream to more innovative research and development as they deepened technological capacity.

It would also seem important to develop a cadre of biotechnology experts for each developing nation, at least adequate to serve as gatekeepers. Nations with aspirations to move up in biotechnology capacity might also consider not only developing the basic industries, but also developing the capacity to train people in biotechnology. This may but need not involve research training to the PhD level.

Intellectual Property Rights

Various kinds of intellectual property rights (IPR) influence the field of biotechnology, including patent rights for products and processes, plant breeder rights, and trademarks.

Countries can be characterized by their balance of payments for intellectual property. Some countries receive more income from the licensing of intellectual property abroad than they pay for licensing intellectual property from abroad. Similarly, industry in some countries makes more money from selling protected products abroad than is spent on products from abroad in those countries. Not surprisingly, countries with the most to gain from IPR have been the most active in promoting globalization of IPR. Indeed, historically only as countries went through the industrialization process did they strengthen IPR protection.

In recent years, international trade agreements have resulted in increased pressures for and interest in strengthening IPR regimes in developing nations. In the newly industrializing nations, this factor has been added to the increasing self-interest in strong IPR regimes, while in the least developed nations it has been hoped that any added costs to the country due to increased respect for foreign IPR would be balanced by advantages due to improved exports of products for which those nations have comparative advantage.

There has been an interest in harmonization of IPR. This seems to make sense in a number of situations. In the case of the European Union, it may contribute to the overall economic integration of the countries of Europe. In Francophone Africa, which already has a considerable integration of IPR systems, harmonization may offer some efficiency to poor countries helping them avoid duplication of efforts.

I suspect that countries seeking to attract investment from multinational corporations will benefit by having IPR regimes that enable corporation executives to feel comfortable that their companies intellectual property will be safe. There might be a small additional benefit if such countries provide IPR regimes that are also familiar to those corporate executives and their lawyers.

Ultimately, however, harmonization of IPR will provide only limited advantages to countries seeking to build the capacity to bring biotechnology to bear on development priorities, and then only in the presence of other supporting factors. A strong IPR regime is not a panacea.

Two Reports from UNCTAD

These two reports from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development seem interesting:

* WORLD INVESTMENT REPORT 2005 (Part Two assesses the implications of the surge in R&D internationalization by trans-national corporations.
* THE LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES REPORT, 2006: Developing Productive Capacities

"A New Model For Getting Rich Online"

Read "A New Model For Getting Rich Online: Investors Not Needed, Just a Site With Ads" by Yuki Noguchi online in The Washington Post (July 28, 2006).

This article describes how some personal and small-business Web pages are generating substantial income from Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. placed advertisements. PodcastDirectory.com, a search engine for podcasts, rose from a hundred hits a month in 2004 to nearly a million now; it started earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year from Google's AdSense simply because people clicked on ads. The site owner is now trying to make more money by attracting still more traffic to his site.

David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville, say they collect $100,000 a month from their year-old site, Freeweblayouts.net, which gives away designs that people can use on MySpace social-networking pages.

SeatGuru, which gets 700,000 visitors a month, generates $10,000 to $20,000 a month through AdSense, and a comperable amount from ad deals make with companies directly.

I included ads placed by Google Adsense on this blog primarily because I hoped they would provide content complementary to my postings that would interest readers. I haven't made any money on it yet, but if the kind readers would visit the blog more often and click through on the AdSense links, maybe I would make some money in the future!

Business Day - News Worth Knowing

Business Day - News Worth Knowing: "At Microsoft’s Government Leaders Forum in Cape Town this week numerous leaders pledged their commitment to fast-tracking information and communications technologies (ICT)."

BBC NEWS | Business | Glaxo has bird flu 'breakthrough'

BBC NEWS | Business | Glaxo has bird flu 'breakthrough': "UK drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline believes it has developed a vaccine for the H5N1 deadly strain of bird flu that may be capable of being mass produced by 2007.

The vaccine has proved effective at two doses of 3.8 micrograms during clinical trials in Belgium"

Globalization and People

In "A Winning Strategy for the Democrats: Barter for Free Trade" in today's Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein makes what I thought to be an important point. He notes that while there is general agreement that globalization has helped the U.S. economy, "it has had some unpleasant side effects: insecurity about job losses, downward pressure on wages, widening inequality, and an unsustainable trade deficit."

There was even a general consensus on what needs to be done to ameliorate those effects. The prescriptions included some old ideas about balancing the federal budget, investing more in education and repealing the Bush tax cuts, and some newer ones such as universal access to health insurance, portable pensions and wage insurance. Protect people, not jobs, was the headline message in the Hamilton Project briefing paper that rejected the protectionist policies of the union left as well as the "you're-on-your-own" economics of the laissez-faire right. (italics added)

Conference on Knowledge for Africa's Development

This conference was sponsored by the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Program, and held May 8-10, 2006, in Johannesburg, South Africa. There are useful resources gathered on the conference website.

The Economist Special Report on Econometric Models

Read the full article in the July 13, 2006 edition of The Economist. (Subscription required.)

The article notes,

Economic models fall into two broad genres. Macroeconomic models, the distant descendants of Phillips's machine, belong mostly in central banks. They capture the economy's ups and downs, providing a compass for the folks with their hands on the monetary tiller. The second species, known as computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, largely ignore the vagaries of the business cycle. They concentrate instead on the underlying structure of production, shedding light on the long-term repercussions of such things as the Doha trade round, a big tax reform or climate change.

It casts some light on the Doha Round (see my last posting):

Two years into the round, as trade ministers gathered for a summit in Mexico, the World Bank was pushing another extravagant simulation. It argued that an ambitious Doha agreement could raise global incomes by $290 billion-520 billion and lift 144m people out of poverty by 2015. Those figures found a ready place in almost every news report about the Doha round that autumn.

Such extravagance did not last. The World Bank has since cut these figures drastically, in part because the ambitions of the Doha negotiators have fallen short of the bank's expectations. One estimate made last year had cut the increase in global incomes to $95 billion and projected 6.2m people might instead move out of poverty. But even as they curb their enthusiasm for Doha, proponents of freer trade argue that CGE models do not show their cause to its best advantage.

Given the apparent failure of the round, I would stress than saving more than six million people from poverty is not a small thing, nor is 95 million dollars a small amount of benefit, especially when more reasonable negotiators might have gotten even more.

I suggest that the key lesson from the article however, comes from these two paragraphs:

In a recent article, Roberta Piermartini and Robert Teh, two economists at the WTO, urge modellers to "?demystify" their creations, making it clear to their audience what makes their models tick. A failure to do this, they argue, "?risks bringing a useful analytical tool into disrepute and may even induce unwarranted cynicism about the economic case for open trade.".......

Shantayanan Devarajan, of the World Bank, and Sherman Robinson, of the International Food Policy Research Institute, point out that policymakers need not grasp exactly how a model works, any more than "?a pilot needs to understand the insides of a flight simulator."? This may be true. But too many policymakers never even "fly" their models. They just want to know where they will land. If they were instead prepared to work through the simulations they might find inconsistencies in their thought, unforeseen implications of their policies, or new reasons for their actions. The big number that sums up a model's story "?$520 billion, 1.5% of world GDP, $4.4 trillion" ?is often the least interesting thing about it.

I suggest large scale mathematical models are most useful in helping us to extrapolate the behavior of very complex systems that are described by large quantities of data. They are especially useful to illuminate unexpected, emergent properties of such systems. However, properties can emerge from the models due not to the behavior of the real system, but from elements of the model that do not accurately represent the real system. I suggest that it is especially important when a model yields unexpected behavior that we go back and understand just where and how that behavior arises from the model. In that way we have a better chance of understanding whether it is a characteristic of the real system, or an artifact of the model.

Unfortunately, in my experience, those who are uncomfortable with quantitative approaches are too likely to accept the predictions of a model without understanding the model itself. Those who best use models, distrust their predictions, and spend time to understand the basis for those predictions. The models themselves are very useful tools in this exploration.

An anecdote:

Many years ago, when computers were young and models were simple, a colleague and I did a computer model to optimize the business of a small company. We walked into the company president's office and began the meeting with the comment,

We have good news. You can increase production by one-third.

The production manager, at the right of the president, jumped to his feet and yelled, "we can't sell that much". Simultaneously, the sales manager leaped to his feet and yelled, "we can't produce that much." The president looked to the right and to the left, and said, "thank you gentlemen, I now understand the problem". That was a successful model!

"Trade Talks Fail After Stalemate Over Farm Issues: Collapse Comes With Finger-Pointing"

Read the full article by Paul Blustein in The Washington Post. (July 25, 2006)

Yesterday, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy declared a "suspension" in the Doha round of trade negotiations. "Trade ministers from the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Japan and Australia said they remained hopelessly stalemated on crucial issues of how to lower barriers to commerce, with farm trade by far the most contentious problem." European and Indian spokesmen appeared to blame the failure of the five year old talks on the intransigence of the United States.

"The United States was unwilling to accept, or indeed to acknowledge, the flexibility being shown by others in the room and, as a result, felt unable to show any flexibility on the issue of farm subsidies," said Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner. Nath, the Indian minister, agreed, and said: "Everybody put something on the table except one country who said, 'We can't see anything on the table.'"

The wide authority given to the Bush Administration to negotiate trade deals expires in mid-2007, and Congress appears unlikely to extend it.

"We do not expect to be able to use the current [negotiating authority] to enact a Doha round agreement if and when one comes together," Susan C. Schwab, the chief U.S. trade negotiator, said in a conference call with reporters.

This is a sad event for the poor majority of the world's population! There is every reason to believe that allowing poor nations to export more freely into the wealthy markets of Europe and the United States would have increased incomes and improved their lives.

"Fight against world court takes toll in terror war"

Read the full article by Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times via The International Herald Tribune. (July 23, 2006)

Lead: "The Bush administration and Congress have slashed millions of dollars of military aid to African countries in recent years, moves that Pentagon officials and senior military commanders say have undermined U.S. efforts to combat terrorist threats in Africa and to counter expanding Chinese influence there."

I tend to be against building the military in poor nations as a matter of reflex, but in many cases in Africa I feel that the military is needed to protect against even more destructive violence and social breakdown. Moreover, money is fungible. When African nations don't get military aid from rich nations, they may well spend their own resources drawing funds from health, education, and other crucially needed social investments.

Besides, African nations have been not only the sites of terrorist attacks against U.S. targets, but have offered breeding grounds and safe havens for terrorists.

I am not at all sure about this U.S. policy.

Priorities in biotechnology research for international development

The National Academy of Sciences held a workshop in Berkeley Spring, West Virginia, July 26-30, 1982 on this topic at the request of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The proceedings of the workshop were published that same year, and were widely distributed. Following up on the workshop, projects in medical and agricultural biotechnology were initiated by USAID.

Twenty-four years after the workshop, there is a large literature on the topic, and I am beginning social bookmarking of some of the key links on the Internet on the topic.

"Secrets of the Expert Mind"

This article by Phillip Ross is in the August 2006 Scientific American, and will be available free online next month.

Ross summarizes research which suggests that chess experts have huge stores of knowledge of the game, gained by decades of organized and diligent study of the game (rather than by playing a lot). He suggests that experts play better not because they analyze more, but rather primarily because they use this accumulated knowledge to recognize patterns of pieces on the board, and to recognize the most promising moves from such patterns. They can then restrict their analysis to the more promising moves. Non-experts, even when they analyze in depth, waste effort in analyzing scenarios with low likelihood of panning out.

He suggests that modern chess masters are actually better than those of 100 years ago because the modern masters have more accumulated knowledge as a result of the raising of the bar due to more competition, to better and better organized learning materials and tools.

It is interesting that there are very reliable ways of rating and ranking chess players, but the better rated player does not always beat the lower rated player. What is reliable is the portion of games that the better player will win against the lesser player, given the differences between their ratings.

Would that we had a similar rating scheme for our leaders, be they in the political, economic or social sphere. It would be nice to know we have a clue on who to believe, since these guys make so many mistakes.

I am also concerned that we so often ignore the research on decision making. As a result of this research, we should know that there are some ways to get decisions out of groups that work better than others. Unfortunately, those who organize advisory committees seem seldom to use this knowledge, or indeed to be aware of its existance.

So too, as a result of research on decision making and prediction, we should know that there are ways to train people to make better probability estimates and to avoid common errors of judgement. Unfortunately, I don't know of many places where such training is actually applied to improve decision making.

"Senate Passes Stem Cell Bill; Bush Vows Veto"

Read the full story by Charles Babington in the Washington Post. (July 19, 2006)

Like most Americans willing to give their opinions to survey takers, I am in favor of funding embryonic stem cell research. The potential health benefits are significant, and the embryos will be destroyed anyway.

If the majority of my fellow citizens don't want to fund such research, then those who do fund it will probably benefit disproportionately, so I am glad my state (Maryland) has a legislature which has voted such funding.

I hope that the Bush Administration and its supporters find this issue really hurts them in the upcoming elections, since Bush has taken the wrong side.

Third-World Vaccine Development Plan Stalls

Read the full article online: "Third-World Vaccine Development Plan Stalls: Positions of France, U.S. Means Endorsement Unlikely During G-8 Summit" By Michael M. Phillips, The Wall Street Journal via The Washington Post, July 7, 2006.

In February, G-8 finance ministers, including then-U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, endorsed a novel, business-friendly plan to persuade drug companies to develop vaccines for killer diseases in the Third World. Under the plan, the G-8 would guarantee a market for pharmaceuticals companies that create successful vaccines. Despite lobbying from the United States, Italy and Britain, it now seems unlikely that the G-8 will endorse the proposal next weekend in St. Petersburg, Russia, at their annual summit.

According to Phillips' article:

The proposal "is kind of trembling on the cusp," said a senior official with direct knowledge of the G-8 vaccine discussions. "It is now in substantial danger of flopping even though there is an extraordinary level of support among some key stakeholders."

France now has refused to endorse the vaccine proposal unless the United States backs a French proposal for a new international airline-ticket tax to pay for aid to poor countries, and the Bush administration has refused to do so.

Now would be a good time to lobby for passage of the proposal!

The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators

Go to the Guild website.

The Guild is a non-profit organization that sets professional standards for scientific illustrators, provides opportunities for professional and scholarly development, encourages and assists member networking, and promotes itself to potential clients and the general public. While the Guild is primarily active in the United States, some ten percent of its nearly 1000 members are from other countries.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the scientific illustrators provide a huge service to science, to non-scientists simply interested in fields of scientific knowledge, and especially to those interested in development of policies and strategies for sustainable development based on scientific knowledge.

Some related organizations are:

* The American Society of Botanical Artists, Inc.
* The Association of Medical Illustrators
* The BioCommunications Association
* The International Association of Astronomical Artists

Knowledge for Development: CTA Observatory on S&T for Development

This website is intended to support the policy dialogue on S&T for agricultural and rural development in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. It enables the ACP scientific community - primarily agricultural research and development scientists and technologists, policy makers, farmers and other stakeholders and actors - to share and review results of national and regional efforts and collaborate to harness science and technology for the development of agriculture in their countries. It is supported by CTA, the Technical Center for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation. The portal includes a number of dosiers on topics of science and technology policy, links to other organizations, news and events, and other resources, including a newsletter.

"Building science, technology and innovation policies"

Summary: "National policies for science, technology and innovation can be key to a country's development. But what elements must be in place for such policies to succeed — and also to evolve as the country progresses?" Joachim Ahrens, SciDev.Net, May 2005.

"Science for Society"

The InterAcademy Panel (IAP) on International Issues Conference "Science for Society" and was held in Mexico City in December 2003 in conjunction with the IAP General Assembly. The website includes links to a number of presentations that may be downloaded, as well as information on the conference. The IAP is a global network of 90 science academies designed to help its members develop tools they need to participate in science policy discussions taking place beyond university classrooms and research laboratories.

Women for Science

The low representation of women in science and engineering is a major hindrance to global capacity building in science and technology. This report presents recommendations and action items grouped around three themes:
* Academies advocating and promoting the education and careers of women;
* Academies acting, both individually and jointly, to engage women in global capacity building;
* Academies building inclusive institutional climates and advising governments and other principal players on specific actions toward similar ends. It is published by the InterAcademy Council, and was written by an Advisory Panel created by the Council for the purpose of this report. 2006.

The Global Footprint Network

The Ecological Footprint is a tool which can be used for description and thus management of the ecological impact of human activity. The Network website includes (under free license) downloadable tables of the 2005 footprints for nations, as well as maps and information on global trends. A small staff, with a very distinguished Advisory Council, makes this information available online. The Network is also seeking to develop standards to be used by various groups applying their methodology, in order to help assure comparability in footprints developed by different groups at different times.

Warren Buffett has joined Bill and Melinda Gates to create the world's biggest charitable foundation.

Source: The Economist
I suppose everyone knows about this now, but here is a link to the Economist special report on the event.

"POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Perils of Prognostication"

Read the full book review by John T. Jost online in Science magazine. (cience 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1876 - 1877; Subscription necessary.)

From the review of Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock

Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment will be sobering. The results of his painstaking research are complex, nuanced, and contingent, but the bottom line is clear enough. Tetlock's data "plunk human forecasters into an unflattering spot along the performance continuum, distressingly closer to the chimp than to the formal statistical models." In fact, "it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated statistical ones" (emphasis in original). Worst of all, those experts with the poorest track records are the most likely to show up on TV screens and blogsites everywhere.

"Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion"

Read the full article by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone online in Science magazine. (Science 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1908 - 1910. Subscription required.)

Abstract: "The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others."

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
John F. Kennedy

I am a great admirer of Daniel Kahneman and what I guess might be called his school. He has and they have done a lot to clarify our understanding of the way people think. And indeed, this report in Science is interesting and informative. However, I think the report would be easy to misunderstand and to misrepresent. I would suggest, for example that the article confounds "being in a good mood" with "being happy", and indeed "being satisfied with one's life" with "being happy".

Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.
Louis Armstrong (about jazz)

I think I attach the concept of "pleasure" to "being happy in in moment-to-moment experience" and to "particularly enjoyable activities", but not necessarily the concept of "happiness". I don't know how the dimension "relaxed versus tense" relates to that of "unhappy versus happy", but I would guess that there is very little correlation; can't one can be happy and tense, or unhappy and relaxed? (The goalie on the leading side of a World Cup football match is probably pretty happy and pretty tense; the players on the losing side after a match may well be relaxed but unhappy.)

I suspect the article is most useful in discussing the difference between subjective and objective measures of well-being. The discussion of the "focusing illusion" is useful for those who would do survey research. It illustrates a more general issue that people's response to a survey question depends on their "set", and the set can be established by the preceeding questions.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
Schkade and Kahneman

The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006

Read the full report online (PDF file).

The MDGs Report of the United Nations was released on 3 July 2006. The report presents the latest assessment on how far we have come, and how far we have to go in reaching the goals, in each of the world’s regions.

Reuters AlertNet notes with respect to the report:

"With less than a decade left to meet its development targets, the United Nations said on Monday there were "staggering" obstacles to succeeding and conditions in many poor countries were actually worsening.

"The eight Millennium Development Goals include targets on health, poverty and the environment -- such as halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day and stopping the spread of AIDS and tuberculosis.

"The U.N. progress report on the goals, set in 2000, found that while global incidence of extreme poverty has declined, some 140 million more people have entered that category in sub-Saharan Africa.

"More people are also going hungry in the region, which has seen only modest improvements in child mortality and maternity rates in the past six years, according to the study."