Support the Iranian People

I have changed the address on my Twitter account to Teheran to help confound efforts to block Iranians using the site to organize protests against the election.

I fully support the Obama decision not to have the U.S. government comment on the election, both because I don't think the U.S. government is likely to have good information on the election and because I don't think any comment from the U.S. government would be useful at this time.

I also fully support the Obama statement that peaceful demonstrations should not be met with government violence nor forceful repression.

On the other hand, as an individual I can not but believe that millions of people do not go out on the streets and put themselves in danger to protest without strong cause.

Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2008

A thought on choosing leaders of intergovernmental organizations

An AP reporter asked me a couple of weeks ago whether I thought the process for election of a new Director General for UNESCO should be scrapped and replaced by a new and better one. (I have been watching that process rather obsessively while posting news on the UNESCO's Friends group on LinkedIn.)

I replied that I feared that the idea was simply impractical. The current process of choosing leaders for intergovernmental organizations is fully in the hands of the international diplomatic community, and is intensely political. There are informal agreements that specific countries have the right to choose the heads of some organizations or that the directorships would revolve among the regions of the world. There are trade-offs with governments supporting each others candidates in parallel elections. Unfortunately, in the process the idea of selecting the best man or woman for the job seems often to get lost.

The process differs according to the governance of the organization involved. Some organizations work on one-country one vote, others on the basis of votes proportional to the economic contributions to the organizations, and for programs of the United Nations, the heads are generally appointed. While the processes differ, all seem to be infused by politics. There are clear examples of the process gone wrong.

If you are interested, check:

• Who Will be the Next UN Secretary General
• UNElections.Org
• Improving Global Leadership Selection

Think of the process for selection of senior officials for the U.S. Government. Relatively long lists of candidates for jobs are created, combining both unsolicited applications and nominations by a variety of influential persons. Then there are serious background investigations. Input is solicited from trusted intermediaries who know both the short list candidates and the job. Interviews are conducted. Finally, a person is selected by the executive branch and nominated for the job. Then the legislative branch provides checks and balances for the process, conducting its own investigation, interviews, and voting on whether to confirm the nomination.

For the UNESCO election to be held this fall, there are nine candidates, each nominated by one or more member nations of the Organization. A few have websites and others have online formal biographies, but the information on these sites is highly selective, designed to make the candidate look good. The Internet provides a means for obtaining more information from the press coverage of the candidates previous careers and there is also information on some from the blogosphere and social networking sites. It would seem, however, that some organization such as Transparency International or the OECD might perform a great service by doing full field investigations of the "short list" candidates for heads of the intergovernmental agencies.

UNESCO is exceptional in that at its creation the Organization's Constitution called for member nations to create National Commissions which were to involve representatives from the educational, scientific and cultural communities to participate in the governance of UNESCO. From my observation this system continues to work in some countries, but in many more countries decisions about UNESCO are left to the foreign policy establishment, an establishment that is less than imbued with enthusiasm for education, science and culture.

The intellectual communities would presumably focus on the intellectual qualifications of candidates to manage UNESCO's services to global education, science and culture. However, without better sources of information it is not clear how they could promote support for the best candidates from their national delegations to the Executive Council and General Conference where the Director General will be elected.

In short, I don't see the foreign policy establishment willingly sharing the power to name leaders for the intergovernmental organizations. On the other hand, the key constituencies for the organizations can probably elbow into the process. To do so well, however, there needs to be better information on the candidates available and organized for the relevant constituent communities.

The Information Revolution and the Iranian Demonstrations -- a thought

There has been a lot of publicity noting that Iran is heavily "wired", with large numbers blogging and tweeting. Dishes receiving satellite TV broadcast are ubiquitous. Cell phones have multiplied there as everywhere and the network of personal phones is ubiquitous. Pundits have suggested that the huge demonstrations that have been occurring since the election would not have been possible without this infrastructure, not to mention that we would be unaware of the tumult in Iran without the information being sent out of Iran by regular citizens via the global information infrastructure.

What would you bet that the forces of conservatism are also "wired", that they are watching events via the information infrastructure, that they are burning up the wires and airwaves discussing what to do. If the decision is to use military force to stop the demonstrations, the military will no doubt utilize information and communication technology in all aspects of its preparations and actions.

What would you bet that the U.S., Israeli and other intelligence agencies are picking up huge amounts of traffic on the events, and are using lots of very high technology to observe and analyze what is happening.

If the 21st century technology is enabling the forces of opposition to mobilize and protest the elections, then too it is 21st century technology that may be used to suppress the movement.

I have in the past suggested that technology is a double edged sword, and that whether it will be used to enhance or suppress democratic processes is unclear, likely to depend on other circumstances in which it is applied. I still say so!

"Hunger Threat Widens, Deepens In Horn Of Africa"

According to the World Food Program:

Millions of people in the Horn of Africa face a deadly mix of persistent drought, poor seasonal rains, conflict and stubbornly high food costs. At the same time, the global financial crisis is threatening to exacerbate levels of hunger and desperation across the region.

Read more!

Academies, Other Organizations Urge Streamlining of Visa Process

The presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine today joined other scientific and educational organizations in issuing a statement urging federal agencies to streamline visa processing for scholars and scientists visiting the U.S.

• Statement

Science Academies Urge Faster Response to Climate Change

In a joint statement, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, called on their leaders to "seize all opportunities" to address global climate change that "is happening even faster than previously estimated." The statement urged nations at the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks to adopt goals aimed at reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. The academies also urged the G8+5 governments, meeting in Italy next month, to "lead the transition to an energy efficient and low carbon economy, and foster innovation and research and development for both mitigation and adaptation technologies."

Read the G8+5 Statement

Quotation: Development

Definition of development:

“the enhancement of freedoms that allow people to lead lives that they have reason to value.”

Amartya Sen

Obama: Helping to Build a Knowledge Society in Muslim Lands

Sid Passman brought this passage from President Obama's speech in Cairo to my attention:

I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory. The Internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence into the home. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and change in communities. In all nations -- including America -- this change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we lose control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities -- those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith.

But I also know that human progress cannot be denied. There need not be contradictions between development and tradition. Countries like Japan and South Korea grew their economies enormously while maintaining distinct cultures. The same is true for the astonishing progress within Muslim-majority countries from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai. In ancient times and in our times, Muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education......

On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America. (Applause.) At the same time, we will encourage more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America; invest in online learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo.

On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

On science and technology, we will launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries, and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create more jobs. We'll open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new science envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, grow new crops. Today I'm announcing a new global effort with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to eradicate polio. And we will also expand partnerships with Muslim communities to promote child and maternal health.

This is a very positive aspect of a very good and very important speech!

Ranking Web of World Universities

The ranking of Colleges and Universities and Open Access Initiatives is published twice a year (January and July) including more than 16,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide listed in the Directory.

The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

All of the 25 top rated universities are in the United States!

I attended the following universities in order of attendance:

• UCLA (ranked 18th in the world)
• UC Berkeley (4)
• Michigan State (Peace Corps training) (23)
• UC Irvine (57)

I have taught at the following universities in temporal order:

• UCLA (18)
• UC Berkeley (4)
• Universidad Santa Maria (Chile) (1179, 45 in Latin America)
• Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso (Chile) (1504, 70 in Latin America)
• UC Irvine (57)
• Universidad del Valle (Colombia) (865, 31 in Latin America)
• University of Maryland (19)
• George Washington University (198)

As you can see, I have spent a lot of time in universities. I seem to have lucked out in spending time in the better universities in their regions.

"The Success of Development: Innovation, Ideas and the Global Standard of Living"

Many people are depressed about the state of global development, and especially about the failures of development in Africa. The per capita GDP of rich countries has diverged more and more from that of poor nations and it has become clear that it is hard to raise economic growth rates. However, there is good news: the Malthusian trap of population exceeding carrying capacity seems to have been avoided globally, and health and education status are improving faster than income. This work holds that the drivers of successful development are innovation, ideas and institutions.

This is a draft book that the author, Charles Kenny, is putting online until August 1st (2009) in the hope that some people will read it and provide comments and suggestions for improvement.

"Global Income Distribution and Convergence 1800-2000"

By Péter Földvári and Jan Luiten van Zanden

Abstract

Can the development of the world economy – the growth of global GDP and the increase in global inequality – in the period from 1820 to the present be understood as the result of the spread of one fundamental ‘innovation’, the Industrial Revolution? This paper uses the Maddison (2003) dataset to test a model presented by Lucas (2000) arguing this point. We try to establish how the ‘convergence club’ evolves over time (which countries become a member, when and why), and if the development of global growth and inequality can be explained by the model. We find that the model does to a large extent explain the stylized facts, but does not take into account 1/ that countries can also leave the convergence club (which occurs on a relatively large scale after 1973) and 2/ inequality between non-members of the convergence club (which explains a large part of global inequality). We argue that such an interpretation of the process of divergence and convergence in the world economy has important implications for the analysis of the causes of these processes.

The idea seems quite intuitive. With the industrial revolution, some countries started to rapidly increase GDP. Some countries made the leap to join the front runners as the Industrial Revolution diffused around the world. In recent years, more and more countries joined the Industrial Revolution, but some that were on track to do so lost the path. I suspect that war and poor governance make a lot of the reason that counries fall off the track. It is less obvious what the conditions are to join -- probably a combination of geography, human resources, and institutions,

The Geography of Economic Production

Source: Gallup, Sachs and Mellinger via "The distribution of world income," James Hamilton, Econbrowser,January 13, 2007.

The graph was calculated from GDP per capita multiplied by population density. Some of what it shows corresponds well with our intuition -- Western Europe and the norht-eastern part of the United States are centers of production. Less intuitive to me is the intensity of economic production on the China coast and the Indian piedmont.

The importance of access to the sea stands out, doesn't it!

I suppose all of us who try to tamper with this distribution (development professionals) should be forced to look at this map often. Too bad it uses a projection that does not maintain area, but rather enlarges lands far from the equator.

The Evolution of the Global GDP

Source: Lloyd Sakazaki, "Investing in China: Rapid GDP Growth Rates Indicate Prosperous Future," Seeking Alpha, November 30, 2006.

1950 A.D.-present: Western Europe and its "offshoot" [Maddison's terminology] U.S. economy represented about 54% of the world's GDP in 1950, but this combined percentage has fallen over the past few decades to about 40%, where it sits today. Following on the coattails of Japan's economic growth spurt in the post-World War II years between 1950 and 1990, China [and India, though at a more moderate pace] has begun to rise again. Through accelerated growth, China's economy has gone from representing just 4% to 5% of the world's GDP in the decades [1949-1976] of Chairman Mao's rule, to more than 15% today.

The gap in the data between the start of World War I and the end of World War II indicates that these trends are not always stabile. Still, the trends suggest that the domination of the world economy by the United States and Western Europe may soon be more widely shared.

Oceans: Much more than “fish and ships”

The oceans are suffering. The main source of food for two billion people, a key element in climate control and a largely untapped reserve of vital resources, they deserve to be managed better. This is why the United Nations has decided to celebrate the first ever World Ocean Day on the 8th of June.

Sorry for the late posting.

Read more!

June 17th -- World Day to Combat Desertification

The World Day to Combat Desertification is observed every year on 17 June. This year, the Day's theme is

"Conserving land and water = Securing our common future"

"Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online"

A young man climbs "Freedom Tower"
in Azadi Square in Tehran.
Uncredited photo via The Huffington Post

Source: BRAD STONE and NOAM COHEN, The New York Times, June 15, 2009.

"As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

"Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications."

Too bad Twitter chose last night to go down for maintenance. The Huffington Post has provided a Tweet aggregator for Iran, which I hope will come back online.

"Wall Street’s Toxic Message"

Vanity Fair illustration by Edward Sorel.

Joseph Stiglitz has an article in Vanity Fair with the following summary:

When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.

In the article he writes:

In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.

Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric—“the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand—was just a cover for the old commercial interests.

I continue to be surprised by Prof. Stiglitz' condemnation of the World Bank policies, since he was once the Chief Economist of that institution.

The article suggests, as I understand it, that the best economy is a properly regulated free market economy, with the private sector and the government in balance, each playing its appropriate role. Stiglitz hopes that the disillusionment with American economic problems will not cause other countries to reject market economies.

It seems silly for me to take on a great economist, but I do wonder about this position. The United States and other countries greatly revised their economic institutions to deal with the great depression and its causes, and are likely to revise those institutions again as a result of the current crisis. Moreover, there are many differences in the economic institutions of different developed nations, such as the the degree to which government centralizes health and education services and the extent of the social safety net. It seems to me that countries are continually evolving and adjusting their economic institutions. While all dresses are dresses, there is a huge variety among them; while all free market economies are free market economies, so too there can be variety among them.

I wonder, incidentally, how good a job we are doing in identifying the problems that led to the current crisis. Ex post facto explanations in so complex a system as the global economy seem prone to many errors.

Thanks Emily for pointing out the article to me!

UNESCO SHS Editorial

Here is the abstract of an editorial by Sami Mahroum and Paul de Guchteneire:

It is increasingly recognised that diasporas, and diaspora knowledge networks in particular, may contribute to the benefits of the migration process: in receiving countries by providing valuable international linkages that bring new ideas and skills, in migrant source countries by strengthening ties with their emigrants abroad, and last but not least, to the migrants themselves, by giving them a platform for exchange of experiences and valuable contacts for their professional and private lives.

Traditionally, the relationship between geography, science, technology and innovation(used here broadly to describe all activities relating to scientific and techno-economic change) has been dominated by the concept of “national innovation systems” (NIS) developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Freeman 1988; Lundvall 1992; Nelson 1993). The NIS concept was then extended by Michael Porter (1995) to apply on a regional scale (cluster theory). The NIS approach does not give enough consideration to the role that transnational forces play in shaping and transforming local innovation environments, particularly through the factor of human mobility. In a world that is increasingly witnessing the emergence of transnational communities with extended international networks, a growing body of research on international knowledge networks (IKN)or diaspora knowledge networks (DKN) is providing more insight into the structures and processes of the agents of change that are increasingly shaping many regions around the world. IKN is defined as “a system of coordinated research, study, results dissemination and publication, intellectual exchange, and financing across national boundaries” (Parmar 2002: 13). The actors in such networks may incorporate professional bodies, academic research groups and scientific communities that organise around a special subject matter or issue. The primary motivation of such networks is to create and advance knowledge as well as to share, spread and, in some cases, use that knowledge to inform policy and apply to practice (Stone 2003).

From the Overview of the World Development Report 2009 -- Without Comment

"Place is the most important correlate of a person’s welfare. In the next few decades, a person born in the United States will earn a hundred times more than a Zambian, and live three decades longer. Behind these national averages are numbers even more unsettling. Unless things change radically, a child born in a village far from Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, will live less than half as long as a child born in New York City—and during that short life, will earn just $0.01 for every $2 the New Yorker earns. The New Yorker will enjoy a lifetime income of about $4.5 million, the rural Zambian less than $10,000.

"A Bolivian man with nine years of schooling earns an average of about $460 per month, in dollars that refl ect purchasing power at U.S. prices. But the same person would earn about three times as much in the United States. A Nigerian with nine years of education would earn eight times as much in the United States than in Nigeria. This “place premium” is large throughout the developing world.1 The best predictor of income in the world today is not what or whom you know, but where you work."

"Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component"

Source: The Economist, June 4th 2009.

I quote from an Economics Focus column based on the work of Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal of Harvard University:

Immigrants have typically had their formative experiences in a country with different institutions, benefit systems and attitudes from those of their adopted home. If culture matters, then their attitudes should be different from those of native citizens in similar economic circumstances and closer to those that prevail in their country of origin. Mr Luttmer and Ms Singhal analyse data from the European Social Survey, a biennial multi-country exercise, on the attitudes of over 6,000 immigrants who have moved from one of 32 countries in the survey to another and they find precisely this result.

Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.

This is an interesting study, confirming what we would all assume from the history of ethnic politics in the United States.

"How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research?"

"A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data"
Daniele Fanelli, PLoS One, May 29, 2009.

From the Abstract:

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.

Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

Comment: I would agree with Fanelli that the self reported occasions of misconduct probably under estimate the true value.

Lets think a moment about the estimate of 14% of scientists who report knowledge of falsification by at least one colleague and 72% who report knowledge of other questionable practices by at least one colleague. How do people define "colleague" in answering such a question? I would think that all scientists have read about some of the widely publicized cases of falsification by scientists, so presumably they are not defining "colleague" broadly enough to include any scientist or even any scientist working in their own field of science.

How many "colleagues" would a scientist have on the average with whom he/she was working sufficiently closely to directly observe misconduct? I would guess perhaps four or five at a given time, with some scientists who do a great deal of collaborative research at an extreme tail of the distribution. On the average, perhaps surprisingly, scientists don't spend as much as a decade doing research, so the total number of other scientists observed would be relatively modest. And of course, one does not closely observe the conduct of friends and colleagues.

I recall one fairly strong argument during my days as a researcher in which my coauthors and I debated (hotly) how to report our study, a debate that resulted in doing what I felt to be the right thing. How would one report the attitude of the colleagues seeking to present the results "in the most favorable light"?

And of course, I would be reluctant to answer such a question positively in any case. It would involve a charge against a colleague, which even in the case of anonymity is distasteful.

The level of questionable conduct may be quite high. JAD

"The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers"

Frank Rich wrote this Opinion Piece in todays New York Times. He focuses on a new trend among right wing pundits towards hyperbole that borders on outright fabrication and lies. Certainly there are historical precedents, and in our early history the press was villainous. With two recent right wing assassinations, there is reason to worry that words will encourage and lead to violence. I also think that democracy is advanced by a responsible journalism that seeks to present information rather than misinformation, that promotes reasoned judgment rather than emotional reaction.

By the way, so much for the success of Homeland Security in preventing deaths on American soil due to terrorism.

Thaddeus Holt and "The Deceivers"

I am listening to Thaddeus Holt discuss his book, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. He is describing what I guess is the opposite to the topic of this blog. I am focusing on knowledge for development. He focuses on the efforts of the military to impart false knowledge to the enemy, focusing especially on World War II.

There is a "science" of that effort -- knowing what you want the decision maker to believe, knowing what you want his intelligence sources to convey to the decision maker to achieve that belief, knowing what they already believe and are disposed to believe, and having a plan to plant false leads. Moreover, one does not want to expose the real plans of your side in the process or if your process fails, and ideally one would like to leave the enemy in a state that it can be deceived again when the current deception is complete.

The military actually developed a bureaucracy to deceive, with experts in deception working at very high levels in the chain of command.

I wonder how much we can learn from the deceivers as to how to make decisions, and especially how to avoid self deception.

Final Comments on Tamerlane

My history book club met this week to discuss Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi.

Timur inherited the approach used by Ghengis Khan of building a military by splitting the tribes, and incorporated elements from his constantly enlarging empire. He kept his military busy; successful wars of conquest resulted in a flow of loot that enriched the survivors of his campaigns. He executed bureaucrats of his empire that he found wanting.

He seems to have been pragmatic, adopting religious positions to meet the political needs of the moment, while enjoying wine and a large number of wives denied the religious Muslim. He invited cities to submit, offering them the choice of ruinous donations to his treasury if they did so and retaliation of massive executions, rape, enslavement, and property destruction if they resisted and lost; those who resisted inevitably lost.

One question that came up was why Timur's empire did not last as had the Roman empire. Clearly the answer would be complicated. I would note that the question seemed to imply that a lasting empire is better than a transient one. It made me wonder whether the Tartars would have agreed, since their culture not too long previously had been nomadic disdaining urban centers. Would Timur have chosen to establish a smaller empire that lasted, had he preceived the choice, or would he have chosen to go down in history as a conqueror comparable to Alexander and Ghengis Khan in the extent of his conquests?

A second question was whether Timur was evil. It was noted, for example, that the perception that enslaving people as evil is clearly modern, an ethical judgment that become common only in the 19th century. In Timur's time, mass executions, rape and even the murder of little children might have been regarded differently by the average man, inured to killing animals and early death of his friends and family, than they do today. Still, if a "pragmatic" policy of deliberately inflicting such destruction on city after city is not "evil", then what good is the word?

Sotomayor will add diversity to the Supreme Court

It has long been intuitively obvious that group decisions are usually better than individual decisions, and now psychologists are documenting the phenomenon in controlled experiments. The Supreme Court has nine members in part because it can be expected to make better decisions as a group than any Chief Justice would be expected to make alone.

I suggest that the count is likely to make better decisions if it is made up not only of legal experts, but of jurists who bring different views and experience to the court. Adding another woman to the current court (seven men and one woman) would seem likely to help. Adding a jurist who has experience as a prosecutor to a court without such experience would seem likely to help. Adding a Latina to a court that has never had a Latino member would seem likely to help. Adding a Justice who has experienced poverty to a court drawn largely from middle and upper economic classes may help. So Sonia Sotomayor may well have been right in suggesting that she would bring a diverse background to the court that would help it make better decisions more often.

Tamerlane

I have been reading Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi. I think there has been a failure of imagination, either by the author of by me, possibly both.

War is terrible, but the wars of Tamerlane were even worse than most. The book did not convey the pain of those wars to me.

Think about the Tartar hordes. They traveled thousands of miles, away from home for years at a time, living in camps and on horseback, often hungry, always exhausted, and frequently hungry. Not only did they fight terrible battles with large numbers of casualties, they must have suffered from many diseases in a time before understanding of communicable disease, traveling in large numbers and living in unsanitary conditions. The policy of the Tartar military was, as I understand it, to separate the rank and file from their traditional tribal leaders and to organize ethnically mixed units so that these presumably simple, unlettered soldiers were denied their tribal support. The survivors would return with relative riches, but the likelihood of failure to survive to the end of a campaign must have been relatively high. How could the Tartars have been forced to serve, or how desperate must have been their homelife to make military service a desired alternative.

For the people conquered by Tamerlane's troops the situation must have been even worse. Before the arrival of the Tartar hordes their lives would have been pretty bad; medieval life was not great for most people. If they promptly surrendered to the Tartars they had to pay huge ransom plus continuing tributes, and were likely to suffer from the attentions of the conquering soldiers. If they fought, they were invariably defeated and then were killed in large numbers, the rest being robbed, raped and vandalized.

I know people descended from the Tartars and the Ottomans, and as far as I can see they are pretty much the same as people here and in the other countries in which I have lived and/or worked. They don't seem likely to be more immune from pain and suffering. I try but can not imagine myself as a Tartar soldier or a resident of one of the conquered cities -- the hardship beggers my imagination.

Unfortunately, reading Marozzi did not immediately convey that hardship, it took some independent thinking to recognize how hard were the lives of even the winners of Tamerlane's battles, and how desperate were the lives of those who lost.

Bradford's law

Bradford's law examines the frequency of relevant journal articles in groups of journals. It assumes that journals are ranked by relevance and that the frequency of relevant articles is given by a negative power law.

Suppose that in a month there are 12 articles of interest in those journals. Suppose further that in order to find another dozen articles of interest, the researcher would have to go to an additional 10 journals. Then that researcher's Bradford multiplier bm is 2 (ie 10/5). For each new dozen articles, that researcher will need to look in bm times as many journals. After looking in 5, 10, 20, 40, ... journals, most researchers quickly realize that there is little point in looking further.

The parameters of the distribution will differ for different researchers and/or fields, and presumably vary over time.

It would be interesting to explore the implications of this observed relationship for knowledge systems in developing nations. One wonders, for example, how good page rank algorithms and their like are in ordering sources for relevance.

The Death of Rajeev Motwani

US computer science professor Motwani, 47, was found dead in his swimming pool. A 1998 paper written by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Motwani discussed the development of Google. "We have developed a global ranking of web pages called PageRank based on the link structure of the web that has properties that are useful for search and navigation … We have used PageRank to develop a novel search engine called Google, which also makes heavy use of anchor text," Prof. Motwani "was also an influential investor who backed the initial development of what turned out to be a number of successful hi-tech companies and initiatives, including the internent payment giant PayPal."

Where does U.S. support for Israel's governments stop?

I am not an expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I have consequently refrained from commenting on it until now. An article in the New York Times has broken that resolve. It reveals that there were discussions between the governments of Israel and the United States about Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of the process leading to "the roadmap" -- discussions which have not been made public. Apparently (unnamed) officials of the Netanyahu administration in Israel are holding that the Bush administration agreed to continuation of settlements in the West Bank as part of the deal for removal of the settlements in Gaza; (unnamed) former members of the Bush administration are holding that while the discussions took place in the context of natural growth of the West Bank settlements, they never reached a clear agreement as to what was acceptable.

The Israeli policies in the occupied territories seem to be the result of compromises made by factions of the Israeli political process. Surely there is a significant portion of the Israeli population which wishes to take and hold all the West Bank, while other factions are more than willing to give up land for peace.

Apparently every U.S. administration since the Nixon administration has opposed further settlements, and the Israeli government has allowed further settlements in each of those administrations. Now there is a large Israeli population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as a complex infrastructure to keep them out of harms way. The Israeli settlements and their security apparatus not only makes life difficult to Palestinians, but helps convince many of them that Israel will only be satisfied when they are driven out of their lands or deprived of any hope of political autonomy.

The Unites States greatly values its alliance with Israel, and has provided Israel with huge amounts of military and economic assistance. It has continued to do so over decades in which the Israeli government was ignoring our concerns that the settlements stop growing and more progress be made towards peace.

At what point do we separate our support for Israel from support for whichever party is in power in Israel at the moment. At what point does this country begin to flex the power that Israeli dependency on U.S. aid and trade provides to encourage Israeli government policies that we believe will lead to peace and to discourage Israeli government policies that appear to worsen the prospects for peace?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I suspect and hope it is being seriously debated within the Obama administration.

A New ALA Report

A new publication by the American Library Association reports:

The importance of libraries in American life continued to grow in 2008—and accelerated dramatically as the
national economy sank and people looked for sources of free, effective help in a time of crisis.

A Harris Poll released in September revealed that 68 percent of Americans have a library card, an increase of 5 percent since 2006. In-person visits increased 10 percent in the same period, and 76 percent of Americans had visited their local public library in the year preceding the survey, compared with 66 percent two years ago.
Online-visit data were even more remarkable: 41 percent of library card holders visited their library websites in the year before the poll, compared with 24 percent in 2006.

Unfortunately, in hard economic times, local governments will face budget constraints likely to be transferred to their libraries. As people need the libraries more, the libraries will have fewer resources.

"What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years?"

Knowledge@Warton provides this list, in order of importance:

1. Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and html)
2. PC/laptop computers
3. Mobile phones
4. E-mail
5. DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping
6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
7. Microprocessors
8. Fiber optics
9. Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)
11. Open source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)
12. Light emitting diodes
13. Liquid crystal display (LCD)
14. GPS systems
15. Online shopping/ecommerce/auctions (e.g., eBay)
16. Media file compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3)
17. Microfinance
18. Photovoltaic Solar Energy
19. Large scale wind turbines
20. Social networking via the Internet
21. Graphic user interface (GUI)
22. Digital photography/videography
23. RFID and applications (e.g., EZ Pass)
24. Genetically modified plants
25. Bio fuels
26. Bar codes and scanners
27. ATMs
28. Stents
29. SRAM flash memory
30. Anti retroviral treatment for AIDS

Comment: Without microprocessors there would not be personal computers, and without personal computers and fiber optics, there would not be much value in the Internet. That is true also for ATMs I suppose.

The software commodity business, including Microsoft, is more important than the development of free and open source software, at least so far.

Generally, I guess I would put the evolution of the global information infrastructure as the most important technological development of the past 30 years.

I wonder whether there are not more important medical advances than anti-retrovirals. Perhaps some of the social innovations that are leading to more progress against the diseases of poverty are saving more lives than the anti-retrivurals. JAD

A world awash in money is going to be overwhelmed by debt

I am not an economist, but can the following be right:

The 1990's saw the creation of new financial mechanisms (derivatives) used in the absence of regulation to greatly expand the amount of money available to be lent out as compared with the capital available to cover bad debts. One assumes that increasing returns to ever more highly leveraged capital led to more capital invested in financial enterprises. The oil price spike in the late 1990's also resulted in a glut of money in the oil exporting states, which they must have lent and invested. So there should have been a glut of money, encouraging the developing nations to borrow. Lots of money to lend leads to low interest rates, leads to borrowing for relatively lower valued investments.

Now the nations of the world are borrowing like crazy to have the money to stimulate their economies. Trillions of dollars in borrowing should drive up interest rates. Developing countries which have borrowed to invest in low return projects will not have the ability to borrow even to invest in high return projects!

It seems we have gone through something like this after the oil shocks of the 1970s.

"Science diplomacy: the case for caution"

David Dickson posted some thoughts on the SciDev.Net blog occasioned by a meeting organized in London by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society on the topic “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy“. He points out, quite rightly, that scientists talking about diplomacy often throw out all of the epistemological discipline that characterizes science.

There has been much lively discussion on the value of international collaboration in achieving scientific goals, on the need for researchers to work together on the scientific aspects of global challenges such as climate change and food security, and on the importance of science capacity building in developing countries in order to make this possible.

But there remained little evidence at the end of the meeting on how useful it was to lump all these activities together under the umbrella term of “science diplomacy”.

According to Answers.com, diplomacy is:

The art or practice of conducting international relations, as in negotiating alliances, treaties, and agreements.

It is possible to consider "science diplomacy" in two senses:

• diplomacy for science
• science for diplomacy

In the first sense, one can include the diplomacy carried out:

• to arrange for multinational support for mega-projects or programs, such as those of CERN or SESAME
• to arrange for multinational clearances for cross border research, such as that needed to facilitate access to national waters for oceanographic research voyages
• to allow donor support for efforts to build scientific capacity in developing nations.

Diplomacy, at least in the United States, is generally thought to focus on international economic affairs and secutity. It seems obvious to me that social sciences are relevant to both these concerns. The diplomacy of international economic negotiations must necessarily be informed by economic theory and data. The diplomacy of security should be informed by political science, history, and the other social sciences.

It seems to me that the physical sciences also have their place in science for diplomacy. Wars have been fought over water resources in the past, and will be in the future; hydrology can provide a basis of scientifically agreed upon information on which to base diplomatic negotiations to secure the peace. Similarly, geology can provide scientific information for negotiations over exploitation of mineral and fossil fuel resources. It would be foolish for a nation to embark on negotiations in the ITU on spectrum allocation without understanding the physics of electromagnetic communications.

More generally, however, I think the traditional view of diplomacy has to be expanded to include the diplomacy of global systems problems. Diplomats have to negotiate protections against the international spread of communicable diseases, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of epidemiologists. They must negotiate protections against climate change and its adverse effects, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of climatologists and other scientists. They must negotiate protections against international cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of experts involved in the emerging science of cyberspace.

These comments have been written in the spirit that science begins with taxonomy. I would further suggest that science depends on the formulation of specific questions. One question that might be asked is whether science has informed diplomacy in the past. A different question is whether science might inform diplomacy in the future. The sample one would construct to study the second of these questions would be quite different than that for the first.

Departing from science for the more comfortable realm of anecdote, I recall some years ago in a public meeting the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science said that her criterion for a science attaché was a person who could read and understand one or two articles in an issue of Scientific American. Since Scientific American is accessible to the intelligent layperson, I fear she thought that even a rather dim lay person could do the job. The failure of diplomats to adequately take advantage of science in the past of course should not imply that science is intrinsically useless for diplomacy, nor that efforts to strengthen the links between the scientific and diplomatic communities would not bear fruit.

Obama wants Lula as next World Bank president, Brazilian magazine says

Image source: Con Underground

"Barack Obama has reportedly tapped Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to be the next head of the World Bank.

"The US president, as Bill Clinton did in 1995, is said to be ready to break with the tradition of appointing US citizens in order to install an outsider who would symbolise a commitment to fighting global poverty.

"Lula, an immensely popular leader at home and abroad, has indicated he would be "honoured" to take the job at the bank after he steps down as Brazil's president in 2011, according to the Brazilian magazine Exame."

Comment: The Guardian published this story, apparently depending on a Brazilian magazine article. Even if it is currently accurate, who knows what will happen in a couple of years.

Still this would be a great move by Obama. Lula would be likely to combine the fiscal responsibility he has shown as President of Brazil with a lifelong commitment to social justice.

The President of the United States has traditionally had the appointment of the head of the World Bank, and were Obama to appoint Latin American with Lula's credentials would truly symbolize a new approach to development for this country. JAD

Hopewell Mound City

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Hopewell Mound City in southern Ohio. It is one of the nine archeological sites of monumental earthworks constructed by the Ohio Hopewell culture during the Woodland Period (1-1000 CE) which together have been added to the tentative list by the United States Government for consideration for World Heritage status.

The park protects the prehistoric remains of a dynamic social and ceremonial phenomenon that flourished in the woodlands of eastern North America between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500. The term Hopewell describes a broad network of economic, political, and spiritual beliefs and practices among different Native American groups. The culture is characterized by the construction of enclosures made of earthen walls, often built in geometric patterns and mounds of various shapes. The culture is known for a network of contacts with other groups, which stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains. This network brought materials such as mica, shark's teeth, obsidian, copper, and shells to Ohio.

The visitor center includes a video presentation and a small museum which helped to understand the artifacts collected from the site as well as the historical importance of the Hopewell people. We were especially grateful for the attention of three National Park Service staff members who work in the visitors's center and who spent considerable time explaining the site and its history.

I was especially taken by the fact that the site included objects made of copper that came from Canada, Obsidian from deposits near Yellowstone, mica from the Carolinas, and shells from the Gulf coast. While this was a culture that lived on hunting and gathering, the Hopewell peoples also understood astronomy, could build large earthwork structures, and obtained materials that they valued from all over the North American continent.

World Heritage status for the sites preserving the monuments of the Hopewell culture may help Americans to recognize the accomplishments of the people who lived on the continent before 1492. I wish that all the school children in the United States would learn about the pre-Columbian cultures of the continent!

Images from the National Park Service.

Serpent Mound

Last week my wife and I visited Serpent Mound. The site has been added by the United States Government to the tentative lists of sites to be considered for UNESCO World Heritage status. The Great Serpent Mound is 1,330 feet in length along its coils and averages three feet in height. Excavation of Serpent Mound revealed wood charcoal that was radiocarbon dated to a time consistent with the Fort Ancient culture (AD 1000 to 1500). It is the largest documented surviving example of a prehistoric effigy mound in the world.

The coils of the snake appear to be chosen to point towards celestial sites, such as the the extreme points on the horizon for sunrise and sunset. The site chosen is a rock outcropping on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. Moreover, near the serpent mound on the site managed by the State of Ohio there are far mor ancient mounds.


After the visit I chatted with young people from nearby Indiana, discovering that they had never heard of Serpent Mound. Again, our schools seem not to do a very good job in acquainting their students with the pre-history of our region, even of globally significant artifacts that are near to them.

I am on vacation

I am currently in Indiana, enjoying beautiful weather and views of the Ohio River. I expect to be back home in a few days to take up blogging again.

View of the Ohio River from The Overlook,
a restaurant where I had breakfast

How Technology Can Support Education in Africa

I published a short piece on the online magazine, Foreign Policy Digest, titled "How Technology Can Support Education in Africa". It describes examples of use of information and communications technology applicable to education in Africa.

A thought on reading Tamerlane

I have been reading Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi. He happily describes populations of cities in Central Asia as being very large -- 150,000 for Samarkand in the time of Timur, for example. He also describes Timur's army as 200,000 strong, marching into Samarkand. Figures like that made me wonder about the factors that limit the size of a city's or an army's population.

Sanitation was a limiting factor in the past. Rome reached a population of a million people at its height, in part because it had an infrastructure of aqueducts and sewerage that could support so large a population. Lacking that kind of infrastructure, considerably smaller cities would stop growing because their death rates got so high that the balanced immigration (probably in part because people did not want to move to a city which appeared to be very unhealthy.)

Clearly it had to be possible to feed the city. I suppose one reason that cities often grew on the banks of navigable bodies of water was that water transport was an affordable way to bring food from afar, even before the advent of mechanical power and good roads or railroads.

The food going to a town or city had to be from the production of farms that exceeded the needs of the farmers. Subsistence farms don't support cities. In 14th century Central Asia, there was a history of irrigation, a fairly wide variety of crops, and a fair amount of animal power. The region also depended significantly on livestock that was herded by nomadic peoples, but who probably brought animals to urban markets in order to obtain other goods that they needed. The city was also apparently surrounded by orchards and vinyards, and the people managing the orchards and vinyards may produce more surplus per capita than other farmers. (i recall my days in Chile where you could buy very bad wine for nine cents a liter; it was the cheapest source of calories for the poor!)

Grazing lands could be quite distant from the city since cattle and sheep could walk to market. Similarly, there appeared to be a pretty good road system (at least for mounted messangers who provided a "pony express" linking Timur's widespread empire. One assumes that animal power was used to bring crops to market in the city.

A Tartar army supported its food needs by plundering the lands that it conquered, by hunting, probably by bringing livestock on the march for food, and probably by bringing supplies of grains by wagon or pack train. We are told that Timur's army could stay in the field for years at a time, and that it would camp around a town or city rather than seek to be quartered within the city. Still, one wonders wether 200,000 troops actually returned to Samarkand, or if they did whether they did more than march through town before returning to their tribal homes.

I have read that a number of ancient cities grew to the point where they so destroyed the local environment, for example cutting forests for firewood or overworking the land or water resources to the point that a drought or other environmental event could not be withstood.

It seems clear that these cities on the Silk Road also grew because the trade brought resources to the city which allowed it to acquire more of the food and environmental services that the population needed. The rare goods brought from afar were expensive enough that they would justify a fairly expensive trading infrastructure. Similarly, the plunder brought back from foreign conquests would pay for food and other services brought from afar for the small aristocratic class.

It might be interesting to do an economic model of the affordable size of cities. It would fit into the Zipf law relationships of the distribution of sizes of urban places.

Satellite Remote Sensing Applied to Tropical Diseases

Source: "Satellites and global health: Remote diagnosis," The Economist, May 21st 2009.

The article describes how researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland used meteorological data to predict the development of weather conditions that would favor an epidemic of Rift Valley Fever in East Africa, and how their warning was used by public health officials to reduce the lethality of the epidemic.

Attempts to foresee epidemics such as these have traditionally relied on fieldwork on the ground. This is often slow and expensive. Crunching data from satellites is much less costly. Satellites transmit copious information on temperatures, precipitation, vegetation cover and even the health, moisture content and chlorophyll-production of plants.

The article also mentions applications of satellite data and computer processing to predict tsetse fly vector capacity and thus the danger from sleeping sickness, and to identify the frequency of mosquito breeding sites to help deal with malaria.

Comment: This is a technology that I had hoped would develop more rapidly. As I recall there was an application to screw worm control in Mexico decades ago. I suspect that the problem is that the tropical diseases that are weather related are most problematic in places with few scientists using satellite data (and little funding for remote sensing research. On the other hand, I would think that there could be comparable studies done on air pollution with important health benefits in developed nations as well as developing nations. JAD

Broadband Subscription Rates

Source: The Economist

"The number of broadband subscribers in OECD countries increased by 13% last year to 267m. More than a fifth of the combined population of the 30 mostly rich nations in the OECD now have high-speed access to the internet."

Comment: I notice that the United States is lower in per capita penetration not only than South Korea and some of the Nordic countries, but also the UK, France and Germany. Low connectivity is indicative of failing competitiveness!! JAD

Nominee Sonia Sotomayor

President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, has had the following posts, having graduated from law school in 1979:

• Editor of the Yale Law Journal
• Assistant District Attorney in New York County
• Partner at the commercial litigation firm of Pavia & Harcourt, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation
• Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
• Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit

While in private practice, Sotomayor was appointed in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she served for four years. She has also been a member of the Board of Directors of the State of New York Mortgage Agency (SONYMA), the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the foundation then known as the Maternity Center Association (now called Childbirth Connection).

Sotomayor was an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law from 1998 to 2007 and has been a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School since 1999. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton University and a longtime fan of the New York Yankees.

Do you think she has trouble holding a job? I guess she will hold the new one for a while.

David Dickson leads me to think about culture

David Dickson has an editorial in SciDev.Net on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of C.P. Snow's essay on the two cultures. That essay focused on the divide between the scientific and technological culture and the culture of the literary intelligentsia in Europe and the United States. I tend to think of his point in simplistic terms -- too many people who saw themselves as intellectuals didn't know anything about science and didn't understand modern (or any) technology. I think that point was and is valid.

Dickson points out that Snow had "originally intended to emphasise how a lack of access to science and technology was separating the rich from the poor.'

Both the strength and continued value of Snow's analysis lies in his advocacy that all societies, both rich and poor, should recognise and accept science as an important strand of their culture. It is this idea, for example, that underpins recent efforts in developed and developing countries alike to promote the public's understanding of science.

However:

The shortcomings of this scientific determinism became apparent in the decades following Snow's lecture. In that period, political discourse became increasingly centred not on science's promises, but on its unacceptable side-effects — from nuclear weapons and environmental pollution to global warming and climate change.

It occurs to me that the "two culture" approach owes more to our dialectic tradition than to reality.

Today we talk about the culture wars, based on disagreements between two subcultures on issues such as the teaching of evolution and stem cell research. We also focus on tensions between Muslim and Christian communities. World War II and the Cold War may be seen in terms of a clash of democratic and faschist/authoritarian cultures. Oscar Lewis wrote about the "culture of poverty" implicitly contrasting it with dominant culture or culture that would promote economic success. There is a history within development theory of contrasting "modern" and "traditional" cultures.

It may be useful to think of culture in terms of memes. Many memes make up a culture. Individual memes arise, are diffused, and die out. The result is populations of countries that are not homogeneous culturally as well as cultural gradients rather than cultural boundaries. Framing the discussion in terms of memes leads one to question on the utility of individual memes, how acceptance of memes may be changed, and the degree to which mutual reinforcing memes cluster together.

Having said that, it seems to me that it may be useful to consider the sources of authority in cultural dialog. Scientific culture sees authority as rooted in replicated controlled observations, while technological culture sees authority as rooted in the functioning of applications of technological knowledge. This pragmatic view of authority may be contrasted with a view that authority is based on religious revelation or tradition.

Not surprisingly, in a blog focusing on knowledge for development, I have a strong preference towards observation based authority. At the least it seems to me that everyone should accept that if observation does not agree with belief, and observations are replicated to preclude observational error, then beliefs should be examined and my be seen as mininterpretations of the bases of belief.

Marni Nixon: The Voice You Didn't Know You Knew

Marni Nixon sang the following uncredited roles in the movies:

• Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady
• Maria in West Side Story
• Anna in The King and I

The Hollywood studio system used voice doubles for their stars in these films, but refused to acknowledge the fact with billing for the singer. Nixon also sang the high notes for Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Susan Boyle Does it Again: Memories

Teaching How to Promote Peace

The Knowledge Policy blog has a posting on Innovative Thinking and Peace: The Peace Innovation Course at Stanford. That in turn led me to a Facebook site related to the class.

Those in turn reminded me of David Adams website, Culture of Peace.

I suppose that the UNESCO course I teach at GWU is a peace (social) innovation, as UNESCO itself was a social innovation six decades ago, "building the defenses of peace in the minds of men".

Thinking about thinking and Mark Kac

When I was a young research engineer, I had the opportunity to work with Mark Kac during a summer. Kac was a very great mathematician, a Fields Prize winner. He had come to the lab in balmy southern California for a summer as a vacation from his post as a full professor of Mathematics at Rockefeller University. Two of my colleagues in the lab had been his graduate students in the past.

Professor Kac was a colorful man, and there were many stories of his totally logical approach to situations that seemed to defy logic. I might be able to add one.

On arrival he informed me and my colleagues that he had noticed over the years that he produced good mathematical results at a rate of four per year. Moreover, it didn't seem to matter whether he worked hard or not during that year. Therefore, the logical thing was not to work hard. Therefore he proposed to take it very easy for the next couple of months. In fact, he did so! However, in the final month of the summer he started working long hours, and indeed at the end of the summer published a major paper in a prestigious journal.

In retrospect, I wonder whether he had trained his subconscious mind to work while his conscious mind was taking a break. Perhaps in those first couple of months that summer while he appeared to be taking it easy and enjoying the southern California weather and sites, he was also mulling over a critical problem faced by our laboratory, and when he was ready to put thought to paper, that thought was mature and ready to crystalize and share.

In any case, that summer provided a rare opportunity for me to get to know a man with a really great intellect!

There is a good review of Kac' autobiography, "Enigmas of Chance"

Big ot Small Best for Innovation?

There is an interesting article in The New York Times. I quote:

There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 classic, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which examined the process of disruptive change......

Solutions won’t come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors.

“These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game,” said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations.

Comment: I am increasingly concerned that the emphasis on technological innovation is misplaced. Innovation is easier in my opinion that mastery of the innovation. It was not the first firm to produce an operating system, but Microsoft that built a global software powerhouse. Apple has been a consistent innovator, but the IBM clones dominate the PC market.

Indeed, it is almost a rule that an invention is uneconomical at first, requiring improvements to become economically successful. JAD

Layers and layers of knowledge systems

Jared Diamond
Photo: TOM JOHNSON
BLACK STAR/NEWSCOM

Science magazine has an article focusing on a suit brought against Jarad Diamond, a well known scientist who has also gained a following for his non-fiction writing. The suit apparently charges that he wrote untrue and damaging things about people he portrayed in a New Yorker article as involved in a blood feud in New Guinea. I was caught by this statement:

Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and scientific methodology to study human cultures. Next is the craft of journalism, with its own set of ethics and practices aimed at reaching the general public. Finally, there is Papua New Guinea, a young nation still struggling to integrate many hundreds of tribes and clans into a modern state.

Actually, I see two more worlds colliding: the world of courts, judges, lawyers and expert witnesses, and the world of science journalism (as opposed to popular journalism) as Science reporters seek to explain the situation to an audience composed mainly of professional scientists, very few of whom are ethnologists.

The point is, each of these worlds has its own processes for validating information, its own standards for the transmission of assertions, and its own culture of knowledge.

I assume that folk in New Guinea, like the folk in my ancestor's Ireland, may feel that a good story is worth telling even if it differs substantially from recalled facts if the deviations are enough fun. For an ethnologist, verbal behavior is worth recording, and it is interesting what and how an informant tells a story; of course the interpretation of the story is a different thing -- interpretation rather than observation -- explaining observation in terms of theory. A serious news article should seek to provide accurate accounts of events in a timely fashion. The legal system is involved in ascertaining blame and levying penalties in accordance with blame. Science presumably is seeking to accurately portray the events of the "meta story" (the story about Diamond's New Guinea story) interpreting its importance for the scientific community.

Makes me want to recur to Stephen Colbert's concept of "truthiness".

6 Heads Are Better than 2

From Science magazine:

A study of the gregarious house sparrow suggests that individuals in larger groups are swifter at solving new problems than those in smaller groups—findings that add a behavioral dimension to the ecological costs and benefits of group living. Using wild-caught birds that were then acclimatized to experimental aviaries, Liker and Bókony investigated whether group size affected the success rate at which birds figured out how to obtain seeds from a familiar feeder when access was blocked with a transparent lid. The larger groups, which contained six birds, were able to dislodge the lids roughly 10 times as quickly as smaller groups of two birds—a pattern that was consistent across all individuals in the groups. Also, birds from urban environments were faster than birds from rural backgrounds. Increased success at problem-solving in larger groups may reflect a wider diversity of experience and skill among the individuals in the group and may constitute an adaptive advantage in complex habitats.

Comment: Interesting. I wonder if this extends to other social species. JAD

Are Perceptions of Patterns and Intentionality Inherited

Michael Shermer has an article in the current issue of Scientific American suggesting that we have evolved both to see patterns and to perceive the patterns that we see as intentional. I think he must be right that the perception of patterns is a survival trait. Our ancestors had to learn where to find food and how to avoid predators and those skills involve pattern recognition. Where they concluded that it was dangerous to have one's path crossed by a black cat or that knocking on wood could protect from bad luck, the costs were small.

More interesting is his suggestion that people evolved to attribute intentionality to a perceived pattern. Of course, if one is avoiding being eaten by a predator is it probably useful to assume that the predator is actively seeking a meal. However, our ancestors tended to believe that if one was sickening, it must be because some thing or some one willed one to get sick.

I have often thought that the development of a body of understanding of processes that could produce order without intentionality was not only one of the great advances of science, but a major cultural advance. We can see how markets can set clearing prices, how evolution can produce a web of complex species, and indeed how organizations can behave in ways none of their members fully understand. If Shermer is right, substituting intellectual for instinctive understanding is even more impressive than I had thought.

An interesting parallel

A grove of Aspens appears to the uninitiated as a grove of individual trees. Biologists these days tend to regard them as a single organism since they are clones grown from a single seedling. A root system proliferates underground, and may live for thousands of years, sending up new trees from time to time. The individual trees live for a century or more, but the entire organism is very long lived.

We think of Manhattan, one of the places in which the skyscraper was invented, in terms of its above ground buildings and indeed its skyline. However, there is an underground support network of subways, aqueducts, sewerage, steam lines, fiber optics, gas lines, not to mention outmoded systems such as the pneumatic tubes that once carried messages from building to building. The network is dense, and parts of it are more than 100 feet deep. Individual building are replaced but the overall structure of the city remains.

I could try to extend the analogy to discuss the social and economic environment which determines the growth and survival of the city, but I will refrain from doing so!

A thought about closing Guantanamo

I gather than no one has ever escaped from a modern maximum security federal penitentiary. I don't think anyone has escaped from the prison in Guantanamo either. So what does it matter where the facilities are located?

Still, what would be the danger of placing the Guantanamo inhabitants in the wilds of Wyoming or Alaska. Why is it safer to have them a stone's throw from Cuban territory where they might get asylum, rather than in an area of the United States where they would have few survival skills, a hostile local population, and would stick out like flies in a bowl of soup if they escaped prison?

The reason that the Bush administration put the prisoners in Cuba was to get them out of Afghanistan and Iraq, but keep them from somewhere that they would have constitutional protection. The courts have ruled that Guantanamo is not such a place. We kept German prisoners of war in the continental United States during World War II, and we could keep Al Qaeda suspects safe here as well.

In opposition to the candidacy of Farouk Hosny

I see the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to be very important to the world's future. It was created in the aftermath of World War II, and for six decades has sought to promote intellectual development globally, in the recognition that peace is best promoted in the long run by promoting dialog among peoples and a culture of peace. It is a relatively small organization. Its annual budget is less than one-quarter of the annual budget of my local school district. Yet is has influence through a huge network of networks of educators, scientists, and cultural leaders which it has catalyzed and developed over time.

In October it will elect a new Director General, who in all likelihood will serve two terms. During the new Director General's term of office the nations of the world will in all likelihood make major commitments to international cooperation in education, science and cultural development. As the leadership of UNESCO should be critical in this time, so too the leadership of UNESCO's Director General should enable the organization to play its critically important role well.

Nominations for the new Director General must be made by the end of May. They will be reviewed by the Executive Board of UNESCO in September, and the new Director General will be elected by UNESCO's General Conference in October.

There are several candidates for the post but the leading candidate appears to be the Egyptian Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny, who appears to have the support of the Arab nations. The election will be on the basis of one-country one-vote in the 193 member General Conference. Thus the election will be decided by the developing nations if they choose to vote as a block. The Egyptian government is working hard to line up developing nation support for Hosny.

Unfortunately, Hosny has made a number of anti-Israeli public statements over the years and indeed has made anti-Jewish statements as well. He has publicly threatened to burn Israeli books and stated that Israel has made no contribution to world culture. His candidacy has not only generated opposition from several governments and from many intellectuals, but even from significant numbers of Egyptians.

I recognize that it is often politically expedient for Egyptian politicians to make statements against Israel, and that such statements may not reflect deeply held beliefs. Still, I can not support a man for the position of Director General of UNESCO who has threatened to use his government position to burn books and who denies the importance of the "Judeo" in Judeo-Christian culture. I hope that one of the other, more appropriate candidates will be elected Director General of UNESCO!

A thought about thinking

One of the implications of the realization that one thinks with one's brain and not just one's conscious mind is the implication that you can think about things that you are not consciously attending to. Of course there are lots of examples: waking up with the solution of a problem "one had slept on", letting problems perk until the solution appears, having a solution pop up while "thinking about something else", recalling at 3:00 a.m. the thing you could not recall during the day at the opportune moment.

The problem is, how do you assure that the unconscious portion of your brain will be attending to the problem for which you seek a solution. Probably one approach is to obsess about a problem for a long time so that your whole brain gets the message, and then turn your conscious attention to something else or go to sleep.