World Heritage Sites in the United States

The following is a list of the UNESCO World Heritage sites in the United States. A green button indicates a natural site and yellow a cultural site.

• Mesa Verde National Park*
• Yellowstone National Park*
• Everglades National Park
• Grand Canyon National Park*
• Independence Hall*
• Kluane / Wrangell-St Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek
• Redwood National and State Parks*
• Mammoth Cave National Park
• Olympic National Park
• Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site*
• La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site in Puerto Rico*
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park*
• Statue of Liberty
• Yosemite National Park*
• Chaco Culture*
• Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
• Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville*
• Pueblo de Taos*
• Carlsbad Caverns National Park
• Waterton Glacier International Peace Park

I have marked the ones I have visited with an asterisk. I still have some to see.

A Comment on the Health Care Reform

I think we need a health care reform which achieves the following:

• Improves health outcomes in the United States to the point that they are at least as good as those of other OECD nations,
• Reduce health care costs, or at least the rate of growth of health care costs to the nation so that they eventually are more nearly comparable with costs in other countries,
• Reduce the number of uninsured persons in the United States from nearly 50 million to no more than 8 or 10 million,
• Ideally improve the quality of care and reduce the amount of and amount spent on health services which do not improve health.

The Congress should be able to come up with a bill and the President to sign that bill that achieves those objectives. One hopes that it will be minimally disruptive to the arrangements that are valued by the majority of our citizens.

Thoughts about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Last night my book club met to discuss A world made new: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human by Mary Ann Glendon. I thought it was a good discussion, and I want to share a couple of the major topics.

For most of us it is hard to understand the minds of the people who created the Universal Declaration and the United Nations system in which it found its expression. These were people who had lived through the first and second World Wars, often in positions of authority in both, as well as the Great Depresssion. They were shocked by the evidence acruing from the Holocaust and other attrocities, and the atom bomb had suggested that a third world war would be still more horrible than the second. These were people who thought that an international system might be created that would help preserve the peace and that would avoid the problems that killed the League of Nations.

The people negotiating the Universal Declaration were not all liberals, in the sense of political proponents of protection of human rights. Indeed some were there to make propaganda points, some to stall and delay and perhaps kill the effort, and only some to negotiate a strong Declaration. So why did they keep negotiating?

In our last election the division became very clear, with the Republicans much more skeptical about negotiating with the world in the UN setting and the Democrats much more willing to do so. Indeed, the Obama administration has rejoined the UN Human Rights Council and the Bush administration refused to seek a place on it. One answer is that the United States Delegation was rather successful in negotiating a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so the decision to stick to the negotiations looks pretty good in retrospect.

It does seem that there was a perfect conjunction of positive factors. There were many issues in play in the creation of the new international system and the nations were willing to give up on some issues to get their way on others. The Nurenberg Declaration had established international standards for human rights at least in the case of war. Moreover, the committee drafting the Universal Declaration was exceptionally qualified, with key people appointed for their expertise rather than their political committment to an ideological position or as aparatcheks of government bureaucracies.

The performance of Eleanor Roosevelt deserves special note. She was probably the most famous person in the world, with a strong record of promotion of human rights in the United States. She was very good at a human level with the individual members of the committee, and selflessly let others, usually more intellectually qualified, do the heavy lifting of drafting the Declaration. On the other hand, she skillfully walked the fine between that which would be too extreme to be accepted by conservatives in the United States, and that which would be too modest to be accepted by liberals.

So how important was the Universal Declaration. It was a declaration, in the sense of a simple statement of the hopes of the member nations, and six decades later the Conventions and Covenants that put teeth into the support for international protection of human rights are still under negotiation. Moreover, what does it really mean to say that people have a right to a job whcn no government is able to assure meaningful employment for all of its people all of the time? What does it mean to say that everyone has a right to basic education when six decades later there are 75 million school age kids who can't go to school and three-quarters of a billion illiterate adults?

It seems that one effect of the Universal Declaration was that there have been nine major and many more minor Conventions negotiated protecting human rights. Moreover, many national constitutions have included statements guaranteeing protection of human rights. Recognizing how unprecedented the Univeral Declaration was, one may question whether it influenced member states of the UN to enshrine bills of rights in their constitutions and legislation.

Moreover, the simply declaration of values may help to move toward those values even when people fail to live up to them. There have been a couple of generations who have grown up in a world in which the nations had declared there to be univeral human rights and have negotiated a series of Conventions to provide some guarantees for those rights. One may assume that those generations are more liberal than they might otherwise be.

Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous posting, there is pretty good evidence that Constitutional liberalism is a strong contributor to success in political and economic progress.

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities

Check out the talk given by Paul Romer at TED in July

About the talk

How can a struggling country break out of poverty if it's trapped in a system of bad rules? Economist Paul Romer unveils a bold idea: "charter cities," city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. (Could Guantánamo Bay become the next Hong Kong?)

About Paul Romer

Paul Romer is developing a radical new model of growth and governance, which calls for the establishment of city-scale special administrative zones

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

The Future of Freedom is not a book of history, although the author uses historical examples to make his points. It certainly deals with current affairs in America, the Middle East, India, and other areas but it is not typical journalism. It focuses on the freedom and democracy, but deals with the interplay of these properties of society and economics. Since the book is basically the presentation of the author's ideas on the nature of society, I guess I would characterize it as a book of the philosophy of political-economics. Of course, Fareed Zakaria is a distinguished journalist with an international "beat".

The key conclusion of the book by Fareed Zakaria, from the point of view of domestic policy, is that the increasing democratization of American society is leading to a deterioration of the quality of governance and threatens individual freedom. (Zakaria uses the term liberal in the 18th century sense of commitment to the protection of individual liberties.) Since Zakaria values democracy, freedom and good governance, the conclusion is painful.

The key conclusions of the book from the point of view of developing nations are that:

• Sustainable democracy is unlikely to be achieved while a country is suffering from extreme poverty
• Constitutional liberalism (representative government, independent judiciary, separation of church and state, bill of rights) appears to precede successful democratization
• Liberalizing authoritatian regimes may be needed to produce constitutional liberalism, and such regimes depend on the moral behaviour of the elite
• Constitutional liberalism is also the result of the development of social institutions (e.g. churches resisting state oversight, market economy sufficiently successful to generate economically independent classes, civil society organizations, political parties) which are sufficiently strong to counteract government coercive power
• Without constitutional liberalism, broad sufferage is likely to result in populist dictatorship or tirany of the majority.

Zakaria points out that there is a correlation between culture and political and economic development, but suggests that with the right institutions and policies, cultures can change in ways that are productive of political and economic progress. That seems to me to be likely to be true, but it also seems to me that culture includes items such as:

• The nature of elites and the moral commitments of the members of the elite,
• The instititutions that are accepted and utilized by the members of the culture
• The governmental policies that are preferred by the members of the culture.

The book is informed by research and the analysis of other authors, but I found myself with an inquietude that Zakaria is too smart and writes too well. It may be that his conclusions are too facile to be given full credence, but it is hard to see where they fail. One key point is that Zakaria shows how many very smart people have been wrong about these issues in the past. He may be in that good company.

Niall Ferguson did a good review of the book for The New York Times in 2003.

Mosquitoes Hitch Airplane Rides, Threatening Galapagos Wildlife

Bloomberg reports that "mosquitoes are riding airplanes to the Galapagos Islands from the South American mainland, threatening to bring new illnesses to an archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution."

A World Heritage site, these 19 islands and the surrounding marine reserve have been called a unique ‘living museum and showcase of evolution’. Avian malaria is just one of the threats that may be brought by invading mosquitoes, and the birds of the islands are especially important both to the ecology of the islands and to the history of science.

Thoughts on taxonomy occassion by an article in the NYT

HUMMINGBIRDS from

Kunstformen der Natur

by Ernst Haeckel

Carol Yoon has an article in the New York Times today discussing taxonomy. She makes a number of important points:

• Descriptive science is important, and without taxonomy there would be very little good biological science.
• The field of systematic biology has fallen into doldrums, with many of the practioners reaching an advanced age, collections being closed or even abandoned, and enthusiasm going elsewhere.
• I would add that, as Ed Wilson has pointed out, we have not identified and classified huge numbers of species, and it is far too early to abandon systematice biology.
• Once any cultivated person in our dominant culture was an amateur taxonomist, and even today many tribal peoples have extensive knowledge of plants and animals of their environment,
• Yet today few of our urban folk has much information about or interest in the plants and animals in the world, many of which of course surround us even in our urban or suburban environment.
• I would add that information on taxonomy is very available if one seeks it out and attends to it.

I was especially interested in her account that we seem to have a center of the brain that is critical to our ability to classify plants and animals, and when that center has been damaged life becomes very difficult indeed. She goes on to note that the classifications produced by different cultures share important fundamental characteristics -- we all recognize plants from animals, birds from fish and land animals, and generally group mammals together, we differentiate bushes from trees. So perhaps we have evolved some hard wiring as a species for imposing order on the tree of life.

I was impressed by her comment that we tend to use two words names to identify an object generically and then specifically. While the words are different from language to language, and indeed the classification may differ somewhat from culture to culture, the two word practice seems very broadly accepted.

All of this goes to the point that we think with our brains, and the brain structure and organization imposes structure on our thoughts which is hard to break, and indeed should be broken only with care lest we lose something important.

Incidentally, not only is taxonomy the basis of science, it is the basis of most of good analysis and decision making!

Research4Life has increased research output by scientists in the developing world

Source: "Developing countries' research output shows big increase," Research Information, 9 July 2009/div>

Comparing published research before (1996 – 2002) and after (2002 - 2008) the advent of the Research4Life programs, the analysis has revealed a 194 per cent or 6.4-fold increase in articles published in peer reviewed journals.

Research4Life is the collective name given to HINARI, AGORA and OARE, the three public-private partnerships that offer health, agriculture and environmental research for free or at very low cost to developing countries.

The analysis, conducted by Elsevier’s associate director of scientometrics & market analysis, Andrew Plume, showed that absolute growth in research between 1996 - 2002 was 25 per cent in non Research4Life countries (countries not eligible due to their GNI per capita), 22 per cent in Band 1 countries (eligible countries with less than $1250 annual per capita income or GNI) and 30 per cent in Band 2 countries (eligible countries with $1251 to $3500 GNI). Five years on, between 2002 - 2008, the same figures are 67 per cent, 145 per cent and 194 per cent respectively indicating 2.6-, 6.5- and 6.4-fold increases over the 1996-2002 growth.

"California’s financial crisis jeopardises one of the world’s finest universities"

The Economist inform s methat the University of California system is in peril due to the financial crisis faced by the state.

THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.

It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”

I have also been reading Fareed Zakaria's book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, which has a chapter tracing California's governmental economic woes to the political process that limited the taxes that could be levied by the state government in what he feels is an excess of democracy -- opening decisions to the voters without appropriate safeguards of reprentative government for professional decision making not to mention safeguards for individual rights.

I am a product of the old California educational system, not only of public schools but with degrees from UCLA, Berkeley and UC Irvine. My parents were imigrants with limited economic means, and I could not have afforded an education other than in public universities, and I greatly benefitted from the quality of the University of California campuses in my time.

The system was open to kids who were in the top eighth of their high school classes, except for some schools (such as my Engineering Colleges) which had further limited enrollment and required examinations for entry. Thus the state was offering a great education to its best students as a right. The economic success of the state is in part due to the educational system it supported! It also had a great junior college and state college system, not to mention great private colleges and uiniversities such as Cal Tech, Stanford and USC.

In a later day, I might have been able to finance a college education in more expensive schools by taking out student loans. I have been able to work as a volunteer and public servant in part because I did not carry the huge debt that might have acrued from all those years of university education. I think that in that volunteer and public service I may well have justified the subsidies that California provided for my education, not to mention the taxes I have paid on the income that education allowed me to earn,.

I am sad to hear that the University of California system may lose it quality as a result of failure of the state to continue its adequate support!

New results on demographic transitions

The Economist this week features an article based on the work of Mikko Myrskyla suggesting that the link between development and fertility is changing, and more developed nations are seeing an increase in fertility rates. The demographic transition may eventually result in a world of richer nations with static populations. There may be a large increase, followed by a small decrease before that static level is achieved.

The State of the World's Children

The flagship publication of UNICEF is The State of the World's Children. The 2009 report emphasizes maternal mortality.

"The difference in pregnancy risk between women in developing countries and their peers in the industrialized world is often termed the greatest health divide in the world.

"A woman in Niger has a one in seven chance of dying during the course of her lifetime from complications during pregnancy or delivery. That's in stark contrast to the risk for mothers in America, where it's one in 4,800 or in Ireland, where it's just one in 48,000."

Comment: Why is maternal mortality in the United States 10 times worse than maternal mortality in Ireland? Surely part of the difference is due to the inequity of the American system in which many poor women do not have health insurance, do not receive adequate health education, feel diffident about obtaining health services, and as a result don't get the services that would keep them healthy during pregnancy and help them to survive its perils.

The reason that women in Niger and other poor countries face death so much more frequently due to pregnancy is clearly moral failing of the people of the world. It would not take much to save those lives, but we don't care enough to make the resources available! JAD

Here is a link to the UNICEF Childinfo website with lots of information about the welfare of children of the world.

"Clinical Trials, Wrapped in Red Tape"

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has written an op ed piece for The New York Times suggesting that the U.S. Government's rules for the protection of human subjects of research may have become excessive. She gives examples, such as:

a regulatory branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, halted a University of Michigan study of a simple five-step checklist to prevent infections at health centers. The checklist merely routinized procedures that should be performed anyway, including washing hands with soap and cleaning a patient’s skin with antiseptic. But because researchers intended to assess the checklist’s success, their work met the strict definition of “research,” and thus required patients’ informed consent. Because they had never obtained it, the human research office shut the study down.

Fortunately, the Michigan incident generated enough outcry among scientists, physicians and the public that the agency reversed itself a few weeks later. But in this, it was the exception rather than the rule.

Comment: I approve of Dr. Satel's call for a reexamination of the human subject review process. On the other hand I don't think that one can adequately demonstrate a need for a revision of those standards by use of a few examples.

One conceptual approach would be cost effectiveness analysis. Dr. Satel cites this example:

Before a 43-center study of hypertension could begin at Veterans Affairs medical centers, for example, a year and a half was spent getting all 43 boards to approve the same protocol. Each time a single board required a change to the protocol, the others had to review it and agree as well.

It seems fairly obvious that a system that delegated human subject review to a single VA review board reviewing a 43 hospital study would provide adequate protection for human subjects and cost a lot less than doing the review 43 times. Similarly, it seems clear that a review of hand washing improvement tactics need not require patient informed consent. Cost-effectiveness analysis, even quite simple analysis, might suggest improvements in the ethical review process.

Cost-benefit analysis might compare the risks to human subjects from relaxed standards for human subjects review with the risks to the general population from the delay of biomedical research and from the expenses of the human subject review which could be reprogrammed into added research if the process were simplified.

Note however that economics does not capture all of the issues. If we see informed consent as a human right, then the implication is that the right must be respected even if it costs money and or health problems. So too there are ethical limitations on the risks that the Government can impose on its citizens, even via so indirect a means as funding biomedical research.

The C St. House and the Family

Reading the Doonesbury series on The Family, and watching the segment on The Daily Show this week got me interested. I used Google and found this which is both incredible and important that we share:

How do my UNESCO postings relate to each other

For the past five years I have been managing the website of Americans for UNESCO. AU is a small organization, and I am the member of the Board of Directors with the most Internet experience, so I volunteered. I have used blogger to produce occassional highlights for the homepage of the website and to hold the biographical information on the members of the Board of Directors.

I also manage, with the help of volunteers, two blogs linked to Americans for UNESCO:

• UNESCO in the Spotlight: Education and Culture
• UNESCO in the Spotlight: Science and Communications

The purpose of Americans for UNESCO is to support UNESCO and American knowledge of and involvement in UNESCO. The fundamental purpose of AU's presence on the web is to provide basic information on the organization and to make its occassional publications available online. I have also tried to provide information on the blogs

• on UNESCO that would interest Americans, and
• on American involvement in UNESCO.

I think this is in keeping with the purposes of AU.

Over the years the volunteers and I have added more than 3000 postings on the blogs. They are generally short, and designed to encourage the reader to click on through to the original site from which the information was extracted. Occassionally I report on something related to the organization which I attended, and very occassionally I write an editoral piece, clearly labeling the piece as personal opinion rather than Organizational policy. Given that the site is designed to provide information to Americans, I tend to limit postings to English, although there have been a few in Spanish.

I had started the blogs in the realization that there would be a great deal of content generated over time if I did my job well. Rather than put all that information on the AU website, which would have required updating it, I put most on the blogs. Blog entries are dated, and it is recognized that the links for old postings may no longer be adequate; updating the links is not necessary.

I don't have a way to monitor the use of the AU website, but there have been a couple of thousand visits to the highlights from that website. The blogs get about one hundred visits a day, with a total of more than 100,000 visits to date.

A few months ago I started a Twitter feed under the AmUNESCO name and logo. The tweets, limited to 140 characters or less, are much less informative but also much easier to produce. I emphasize tweets with links to more complete information, and most of mine are retweets of things related to UNESCO initiated by others. There are now more than 1500 followers of the Twitter account, and scattered results suggest that it is generating visits to the sites that it advertizes. (Virginia Lawrence, a comanager of UNESCO's Friends, also runs a Twitter feed on UNESCO under the name UNESCOoer, which currently has more than 900 followers.)

I am a member of LinkedIn, the social networking site, and some months ago I joined a LinkedIn group focusing on UNESCO. Three of us were made managers of the group by its owner, and I have been very active in posting news and discussions for the group. At the request of a UNESCO web manager I renamed the group "UNESCO's Friends". There are now more than 500 members of the group, drawn from all over the world. As a result I have felt free to post content in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German as well as English. I have been posting information on the election of a new Director General of UNESCO and on controversial issues related to UNESCO's programs, feeling that there should be a site facilitating access to such information.

I had been thinking of creating a website with information on the election of the Director General when another interested person encouraged me to do so. Again, using a blogging platform which is free and user friendly, I have created Election of the UNESCO Director General with information on the process of selection of the Director General and the candidates. My idea was to collect information from the web, present it in a common form, making it available to what I hope is a large number of people interested in the governance of UNESCO.

I have been conttributing to Zunia and its predecessor, the Development Gateway, for some eight years as a volunteer. (I suppose there are some 20,000 contributions in its resource base that I contributed,) . Zunia is a portal on international development, providing communities of interest with links and descriptions of resources which may be of use. I have submitted many UNESCO resources to the collection, and indeed will sometimes submit Americans for UNESCO materials to the portal. While the primary purpose of these contributions is to point out potentially useful resources to development practioners, I also want to build usage of the sites that I submit.

And of course this posting is on my personal blog, Thoughts About K4D, which allows me to write what I think without concern for the censorship of others. The theme of this blog is knowledge for development, and I occassionally post things relevant to UNESCO (given its many efforts related to that theme). I also sometimes post things on this blog simply because I want to write about them, as is the case with this posting.

"Leadership Vacancy Raises Fears About USAID's Future"

Source: Mary Beth Sheridan, The Washington Post, August 5, 2009

As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton begins a seven-country African trip with a visit to Kenya, the main U.S. foreign aid agency is in limbo, entering its seventh month without a permanent director despite pledges by the Obama administration to expand development assistance and improve its effectiveness in poor countries.

If a new Administrator were designated today, it would be at least a couple of months before he/she could go through the Congressional confirmation process, be sworn in, and assume office.

I share the article's concern that an Administrator be put in place quickly. I fear that the Obama administration will not hear nor accept information as readily from a temporary acting Administrator as from their own appointee, not to mention that I hope they will find someone who is really good!

The article goes on to express a concern that I share that the different aspects of foreign aid be pulled more together under a strengthened aid agency, and that that agency should be more independent of the State Department than it was under the Bush administration.

The Obama pledge to increase U.S. foreign aid is welcome, but there are real dangers in doing so without a strong institution to manage the foreign aid program.

I am especially concerned with the need for real expertise in the foreign aid agency. It needs, of course, people with broad understanding of the development process who bring understanding of economics, administration, culture, and politics in developing nations. However, the foreign assistance program also needs specialists in public health, education, agriculture, engineering, and many other fields in which projects are developed and implemented.

Thanks to the WP for front page attention to the problem!

Source of image: Statastic.com

Just in Time Knowledge Acquisition

The Internet has brought about many changes in business. For example, it has made "just in time" inventory processes common. If you think about it, the intermediate goods that are used by manufactures embody knowledge, from the primary industries that extract the raw materials with which they are made, and the processing industries which produce the industrial matereials, to the parts manufacturers that use the materials to make parts, not neglecting the knowledge of the intermediaries in those processes. With the Internet, the parts and the knowledge they embody need not be stored for long periods on the basis that they might be needed, but can be obtaining just in time for their use.

Think about outsourcing of business functions. The Internet allows the firm to obtain the needed services just in time for them to be used, without the need to keep people in the firm with the knowledge to produce the services; the firms providing Internet mediated services can utilize their staffs more efficiently because they face a greater demand for the services than would be present within a single firm. Of course, outsourcing to India means that one can find the needed knowledge embodied in people who work cheaper than those with comparable skills in the United States. The Internet makes those low cost skills available just in time and "just in place".

Firms have been slimming down, focusing on their core competencies and outsourcing that which they used to do internally. Again, one can think of the process as maximizing concentration on their core knowledge and skills, and obtaining other needed inputs from other firms "just in time" where those other firms in turn have concentrated on their own specialized knowldedge and skills.

The most obvious and perhaps most important knowledge possessed by a firm is that which is embodied in its people. Clearly it is expensive to staff an organization with people who each possess lots of skills and knowledge. It is usually inefficient in that at any time the individual is unlikely to bring much of that knowledge to bear on the task at hand.

Knowledge depreciates! Technologies change, and the knowledge which once respresented a mastery of a technology will no longer do so at some future date; as technology change accelerates, technological knowledge depreciates more rapidly. Similarly conditions change. The detailed knowledge of markets in the 1990s is not much use in the next decade. The management approaches that may have functioned well for the factory workers of the past may not function equally well for the knowledge workers of the future.

So, can we use the Internet to provide just in time knowledge to the people who work in our organizations? Can they quickly pick up the knowledge that they are about to apply. We know that learning can be improved if it occurs in close conjunction to its application.

I think the military has been working on this problem for a long time, and I think it has been having some success. Still, just in time provision of needed knowledge is going to require major institutional changes. A lot of people still conceptualize a society in which people go to school for a couple of decades and then work for five more without added schooling. That is a system with a huge investment up front, which produces a large stock of knowledge, under the assumptions that it will deteriorate slowly and that much of it will be used regularly. I suspect neither of those assumptions continues to hold.

So we now see a change to lifelong learning, to short courses, to elearning, to instruction provided by commerical firms rather than the public sector, etc. Still there is a long way to go!

Curious Coincidence

There were two Brazilians with strong qualifications interested in the post of Director General of UNESCO, but the Brazilian Government in May chose not to nominate a Brazilian announcing support for the Egyptian candidate. We now read that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt is arriving in Brazilian to discuss possible commercial relations between the two countries with Brazilian President Lula, and that President Mubarak will visit Brazil later this year. The latter announcement also included an Egyptian invitation to the Brazilians to involve themselves in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

A Thought on Reading Zakaria

I continue to read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom it has occurred to me that everybody that he mentions who predicted the future of political systems was wrong. The administrators and theorists from the colonial powers in the past, to the people leading decolonization, to the international development specialists. Maybe the key conclusion of the book is that almost everyone is wrong about such predictions, and if someone is right we probably won't realize it until his/her predictions have been turned into history.

Two entries from The Online Etymology Dictionary

liberal (adj.)

c.1375, from O.Fr. liberal "befitting free men, noble, generous," from L. liberalis "noble, generous," lit. "pertaining to a free man," fromliber "free," from PIE base *leudheros (cf. Gk. eleutheros "free"), probably originally "belonging to the people" (though the precise semantic development is obscure), from *leudho- "people" (cf. O.C.S. ljudu, Lith. liaudis, O.E. leod, Ger. Leute "nation, people"). Earliest reference in Eng. is to the liberal arts (L. artes liberales; see art (n.)), the seven attainments directed to intellectual enlargement, not immediate practical purpose, and thus deemed worthy of a free man (the word in this sense was opposed to servile or mechanical). Sense of "free in bestowing" is from 1387. With a meaning "free from restraint in speech or action" (1490) liberal was used 16c.-17c. as a term of reproach. It revived in a positive sense in the Enlightenment, with a meaning "free from prejudice, tolerant," which emerged 1776-88. Purely in ref. to political opinion, "tending in favor of freedom and democracy" it dates from c.1801, from Fr. libéral, originally applied in Eng. by its opponents (often in Fr. form and with suggestions of foreign lawlessness) to the party favorable to individual political freedoms. But also (especially in U.S. politics) tending to mean "favorable to government action to effect social change," which seems at times to draw more from the religious sense of "free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions" (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform), which dates from 1823.

"Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." [Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary," 1911]

liberty

c.1375, from O.Fr. liberté "freedom," from L. libertatem (nom. libertas) "freedom, condition of a freeman," from liber "free" (see liberal)

"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right." [Learned Hand, 1944]

Nautical sense of "leave of absence" is from 1758. To take liberties "go beyond the bounds of propriety" is from 1625. Sense of "privileges" led to sense of "a person's private land" (1455), which yielded sense in 18c. England and America of "a district within a county but having its own justice of the peace," and also "a district adjacent to a city and in some degree under its municipal jurisdiction" (e.g. Northern Liberties of Philadelphia).

Interesting that Liberal and Liberty have the same Latin root, and that liberal implied "favorable to individual political freedoms".

Why I worry about Farouk Hosny as Candidate for UNESCO Director General

Posted on the Facebook group "Farouk Hosni NO for UNESCO"

A new UNESCO Director General is to be elected in a couple of months. I have been following the campaign pretty closely for someone in Maryland and not Paris. It was once believed that Farouk Hosny, the Egyptian Minister of Culture, was the leading candidate, but he has proven to be very controversial and there are reports that the election is now wide open. (See also this article.) Still I worry that Hosny will be elected to the post. The Executive Board of UNESCO, consisting of 58 member nations, recommends a single candidate for the post in a secret process which is heavily politicized and which has been marked in the past by charges of impropriety.

The first and most important reason for my concern is that it would seem that all four women who have been nominated for the job would do it better than Hosny. Not only is the election of a woman for Director General of UNESCO long overdue, but I believe each of the women has a record of accomplishments and a background in international diplomacy that make her a better candidate than Hosny.

I am concerned as to Hosny's commitment to peace. UNESCO's primary purpose is to create the defenses of peace in the minds of men through the promotion of education, science and culture. Egypt has been committed for many years to promote cultural exchange with Israel as part of the peace process with Israel. There have been few such exchanges during the decades that Hosny has been Minister of Culture, and I have read that he has pronounced himself fundamentally opposed to normalization of Egypt's relations with Israel. Would he lead UNESCO to promote public diplomacy as a means for promotion of peace in the Middle East and/or in other geographical regions?

Hosny's candidacy has been opposed in a widely read editorial by Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Elie Wiesel, focusing in part on an anti-Jewish bias. He and/or his candidacy have been opposed by the Anti-Defamation League, the Free Copts, the Muslim Brotherhood, and left wing intellectual Egyptians. (See also "Farouk Hosni Nominated as UNESCO Director General," Killian Clarke, The Daily News Egypt, July 31, 2007, and "Le pharaon business de Zahi Hawass," L'Express, 3/8/2009 via Africa Time.) A major purpose of UNESCO is to promote tolerance for minorities and cultural diversity. Would a man who has achieved the distinction of opposition from so many groups be a good choice to lead a program promoting respect for cultural diversity?

Hosny is widely quoted as saying that if Israeli books were found in an Egyptian library, he would burn them himself. He has apologized for the statement, but the very fact that he made it makes me question his suitability for the post of Director General of the Organization that promotes books per se, as well as the dissemination of learning, and promotes learning about others to promote peace.

It is charged that Hosny spied on Egyptian students in Paris during his term there in the Egyptian Embassy in the 1970s, and that in doing so he provided information that was to be used by the Egyptian government to pressure the student's families to discourage the student demonstrations. Not only would such behavior be repugnant, but also it suggests that he would be a poor choice for an organization which both defends freedom of expression and promotes international education.

UNESCO is not only an intergovernmental agency, but also one that has an especially sensitive mission and a history that includes a refusal to join for some years by the Soviet Union, and a withdrawal for many years by the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore. I see no indication that Hosny has experience of diplomatic work in such a context, and leading UNESCO is not a job for a novice diplomat. Indeed, Time suggests that he has a history of getting in trouble through the use of intemperate language, a trait that would be deadly in a Director General of UNESCO.

It has been implied in the U.S. press that Hosny has used his authority to approve or disapprove international exhibits of pharaonic artifacts (which are popular and remunerative exhibits for museums in the United States and Europe) to promote exhibits of his own paintings. (See also "Egypt from Two Perspectives," by Christine Temin, The Boston Globe, November 29, 1999.) Again this is a special concern for a candidate to lead UNESCO.

UNESCO is an especially complex organization with a couple of thousand international civil servants (multicultural, multilingual) serving in more than 50 countries. Moreover, it achieves its objectives primarily through external networks and influence on civil society and governments. The Director General is not only faced with running such an organization, but with leading its reform and improvement. The Government of Egypt is ranked by the World Bank as relatively low in government efficiency and quite low in terms of control of corruption. Hosny has run an organization for decades in Egypt that is thought to be inefficient, and that has even been charged with corruption; he has offered his resignation in the past for its shortcomings. (See also this reference.) Is he capable of providing the organizational leadership that is needed from the Director General of UNESCO?

While Farouk Hosny seems well prepared to deal with UNESCO's World Heritage activities and related aspects of its cultural program (although there have been charges of inadequacy in his Ministry during his long administration), I see little indication that he would bring understanding of science nor education to the position of Director General. The resources devoted by UNESCO to its science programs far exceed those of devoted to its culture program, and its science programs are especially important in helping the world deal with increasing pressure on the environment.

The education responsibility is especially important, not only because of UNESCO's key role in Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals, but also because there is going to have to be a major reconceptualization of global educational goals before 2015. I was especially concerned with an interview last year in which Hosny suggested that UNESCO should promote religious education in the schools, a role that in my opinion would be radically inappropriate for UNESCO.

The World Summit on the Information Society, held in two sessions during the last decade, was led by the International Telecommunications Union and UNESCO. It represented a response by the United Nations to the Information Revolution and the changes it is engendering in society. UNESCO brought the Summit to understand that we are moving toward a "Knowledge Society," a society in which knowledge will play an increasing role in social and economic development, and in which knowledge systems will become increasingly complex, international, professionalized and important. UNESCO needs the leadership of a "public intellectual" who understands the Information Revolution and its implications, and can help prepare the Organization to provide the leadership the world requires from it and from the network of intergovernmental organizations. I see no indication that Hosny is such a leader.

Finally, Hosny was born in 1938. The term of office of the Director General is four years, and two terms are allowed. Given the challenges before the organization now, it would be desirable to have a strong Director General to serve two terms, which would mean service until 2017, at which time Hosny would be quite old. Were he an international civil servant, he would already have been forced into retirement. One must worry about the ability of a man of his age to carry out the arduous responsibilities of the post for eight years.

All of the above is based on published reports, and of course some of those may be inaccurate or untrue. I have never met Farouk Hosny, and can not judge his character personally. Yet the overall pattern is worrisome in the context of his candidacy to direct a complex and historically troubled organization with an extremely important mission.

Read more on the election and make your own choice!

Join UNESCO's Friends on LinkedIn!

"The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities"

This figure illustrates the central point in Jamil Salmi's paper on the challenges faced by communities that seek to establish a world class university. While there are differences among the lists of the best universities in the world, it seems to be generally agreed that there are fewer than 100 institutions in the absolutely top rank that combine a strong research program, a strong program training PhDs and the normal functions of the tens of thousands of institutions of higher education.

"Spies, torture and terrorism: The dark pursuit of the truth"

Source: The Economist, July 30th 2009

I quote a long passage from the article:

People familiar with the inner workings of intelligence suggest a more ambiguous story. Intelligence, they argue, is about piecing together fragments of information and building up spider diagrams of connections between suspects. “Intelligence is grains of sand; you don’t usually get the whole beach,” says one veteran.

It is true that in 2001, a time when the CIA and other agencies were woefully ignorant of al-Qaeda’s methods, the prisoners captured after the overthrow of the Taliban were the first rich source of information to help “map the enemy”, as one intelligence source puts it. But, says a former counter-terrorism official, the most valuable information from Mr Zubaydah’s capture came not from his interrogation but from his address book. With Mr Mohammed, says another analyst, the most important factor in stopping further attacks on America was not what the terrorist said under duress, but that he had been captured in the first place.

Intelligence officials maintain that detainees under interrogation provided as many, perhaps more, specks of information as other sources of intelligence on terrorism, including signals and agents. The question that nobody can answer is how much of this could have been obtained without torture.

Let me juxtapose this information with Ben Bernanke's statements on the way the Federal Reserve makes decision (in an interview on PBS News Hour). He said he receives economic reports many times a day and receives anecdotal information filtered up through the Federal Reserve Banks such as opinions of key informants. There is a very strong staff which provides analysis and interpretation. And the decisions are made by a panel of experts, representing the regional staffs, each supported by an expert staff. He pointed out that there is no one indicator that serves to tell the Fed what will happen in the economy and what needs to be done. Rather it is necessary to see the big picture provided by all this data and analysis to draw conclusions.

We know that even the Fed is sometimes wrong, in spite of the importance of their decisions and the seriousness of the decision process.

In both the intelligence business and the economic policy business the key to success is getting a huge amount of information, doing extensive analysis, bringing together a critical mass of experts, and using good group decision making to try to understand the big picture, recognize its critical aspects, and to identify the best alternative decisions.

How seldom do we take decision making comparably seriously, even for important decisions in our personal or business lives.

Experts make mistakes too

The Economist has an article about a new journal, Rejecta Mathematica. which prints only reports that have already been rejected. I recall early in my career when a couple of friends and I submitted an article and waited for months for a response from the editors. Eventually we were told that the manuscript had literally fallen between two desks, and when the editors found it they had already published another paper that had arrived more recently but was too similar to ours to allow ours to be published.

The Economist reports:

PAUL LAUTERBUR, the father of magnetic-resonance imaging, had his seminal paper rejected when he first submitted it to Nature. Peter Higgs, eponymous predictor of physics’s missing boson, faced similar trouble with Physics Letters. But Lauterbur went on to win a Nobel prize for his work, and Dr Higgs is an odds-on favourite to get one soon. A good, rejected paper, then, is by no means an oxymoron.

We know that a lot of articles that prove to be flawed are published. Scientists look for results that would not occur by chance more than once in 20 or once in 100 times, and there are hundreds of thousands submitted each year. And I am not even mentioning the articles that are deliberately falsified, or in which the authors convince themselves a few inconvenient results must have been due to errors in the experimental setup.

We know that journals love to publish surprising results and tend not to publish negative results, biasing the portfolio of published documents. And we know that people sometimes misinterpret the meaning and implications of their observations.

But sometimes experts are just wrong and offer bad advice to the editors.

I spent a lot of time dealing with peer review of research projects. I came to believe that it was necessary to deal with the individual reviews as pieces of information that modify the probability that the project under review was worth funding. I also came to the conclusion that a good panel discussion aided with the judgments, that people are willing to rate proposals on a scale of value rather than simply giving a pass or fail rating, and that the rating scale can improve the information. And I found it useful to have an outside observer reporting on whether the review had been fair.

Making good decisions ain't easy, even if you have expert advice.

Zunia is bringing back the M&E collection

Years ago I started working with Sandra Sargeant to develop resources for the country development gateways of the Development Gateway group related to monitoring and evaluation. We used the Development Gateway platform, and eventually transformed the collection into a website on monitoring and evaluation of ICT projects. A couple of years ago, when the Development Gateway changed platforms, that portal was closed.

The platform has been again moved and renamed Zunia. Now the collection of more than 1000 resources on monitoring and evaluation is being reopened for search and new contributions, as a group on Zunia. For the moment, you can access it here.

A Thought About Innovation Policy

There are a number of innovation clusters in the United States: Silicon Valley, the Route 128 innovation complex, the Internet complex in northern Virginia, etc. I live in Maryland which aspires to have a globally important innovation cluster built around biotechnology industrial innovation.

We know that there are advantages in clustering to promote innovation, as financial and educational services can be colocated to serve the cluster, as there can be spill overs among innovating firms, and as the cluster can provide critical mass for creation of markets for manpower, intermediate goods and services, etc.

Regional governments compete to attract innovation clusters, including by offering subsidized facilities and tax breaks. They spend money on technology promotion agencies and on developing public services that they hope will be needed.

My question is whether the competition among local governments to attract innovation clusters is optimum for the nation. I can imagine it is, in that it promotes competition and in that it prevents errors that may occur when federal bureaucrats try to pick technological winners.

On the other hand, I can imagine that the competition may result in clusters not achieving critical mass, in excessive subsidies being offered by some regions, and in firms choosing suboptimal locations to take advantage of subsidies.

Have there been any studies of optimal national policies to encourage appropriate innovation clusters?

"Silencing murderous messages is not as easy as it sounds"

Source: The Economist, July 23, 2009

Last year, as Kenya faced crisis, radio was used to encourage tribes to participate in ethnic cleansing. In the Rwandan genocide, radio was also used to target individuals and groups for attack and murder.

In an era of drones and spy satellites, it may seem odd that crude simple radio transmitters can still make huge mischief. But the scale and sophistication of broadcasting has mutated downwards as well as upwards. In the mid-20th century, totalitarian dictators found national radio stations were a handy way to foment hate and fear; and non-state actors (from communist guerrillas to churches) have been using radio for almost as long. In recent years the medium has been exploited in ever darker ways by petty warlords as well as by big-time tyrants.

"European companies are suffering from an ineffective patent system "

The Economist reports on the inefficiency of the European patent system, since patents authorized by the European Patent Office must be validated, translated and annually renewed in all" 27 members of the European Union and nine other European countries. Moreover, litigation of a patent dispute takes place in each affected country under the laws of that country.

At least some of the developing regions of the world have tried to establish effective regional intellectual property rights systesm.

Frances Perkins

Source: "Frances Perkins: A life of labour," The Economist, July 23rd 2009.

I only recently became aware of this hero of the Depression.

As America’s first female cabinet secretary, Perkins masterminded the introduction of unemployment insurance and Social Security (public pensions), with crucial ramifications. She spearheaded a radical overhaul of labour laws, introducing a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week and a ban on child labour. During her tenure, which lasted for all 12 years of Roosevelt’s presidency, workers won the right to collective bargaining, and union membership exploded.

She is the subject of a new biography:

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labour and His Moral Conscience. By Kirstin Downey.Nan A. Talese; 458 pages; $35.Buy from Amazon.com.

"In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable"

Source: BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, July 27, 2009.

I quote:

In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises.

The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”

Comment: Still another example of the fact that we think with our brains, not our (conscious) minds. In this case, people get good at getting lifesaving hunches and save lives. Indeed, this may be a living example of an ability with survival value. JAD

Evaluation of the UNESCO Policy and Capacity Building for STI

UNESCO is currently recruiting a small team to evaluate its programs in policy and capacity building for science, technology and innovation. Thinking about the terms:

• "Science" is involved in the creation and dissemination of knowledge,
• "Technology" is involved in the applications of knowledge to practice, in areas such as manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, environment, mining, forestry, fisheries, etc.
• "Innovation" is the process of introducing new knowledge and technology into a society, and in this context, especially to the economic systems of a society.
• "Policy" is often used to indicate an entire range of concerns from policy to strategy to tactics.
• "Capacity building" would include education and training to build human capacity, but also organizational development and the development of other institutions (such as the markets for technological services or professionalization instittuions).

The problem is, in my mind, that UNESCO deals with these issues in such a variety of contexts. There is an African STI Initiative, related to a UN wide effort in support of development and application of science and technology in Africa. There is also The Venice Process for Reconstructing Science Systems in Eastern Europe, which includes or is related to more general issues in STI in the region, More generally, the Science Policy unit has a global responsibility. Thus it must address not only Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Communist nations, but also the Islamic nations, Latin America and Asian nations.

In the poorest nations, research and development may be almost completely absent, while in the most advanced developing nations it may represent two or three percent of GDP. In the poorest nations, the productive activities tend to emphasize extractive industries in rural areas, be labor rather than capital intensive, and be carried out by often ill and often poorly educated workers. With economic development there are shifts to manufacturing, urban areas, more capital intensive technology, and more human capital. Thus there are huge differences in the technologies involved and the productive systems in which they are utilized.

Institution building seemingly should depend on the existing institutions, building on what exists and making such adaptions are are both likely to enhance productivity and acceptable within the larger cultural matrix. Again, the existing institutional bases and cultural matrices are quite different in each of these regions, not to say in every country.

The key to success for UNESCO is to tailor each program not only to the resources available and the demands from the host country, but also to the needs of the situation. The evaluation would seem to be required to focus on how well UNESCO staff, consultants and advisors do so. That in turn would require a team to make informed judgments as to what is appropriate in each situation.

Many years ago I participated in a long evaluation of USAID/s lead program for the development and introduction of Appropriate Technologies in developing countries. We sent teams out to Africa, Asia and Latin America, reviewing the work of grantee teams in Africa, Asia and Latin America respectively. The result was three reports that had little in common. We had confounded the differences in the evaluation teams with the differences in the project teams and with the differences in the situations that they faced. We were never able to disambiguate the three to my satisfaction.

Visa problems and the United States

In February, a letter was sent to all ICSU Members regarding delays in the processing of visa applications for scientists entering the USA. This problem related particularly to some nationalities and was not only limited to the USA.

In June, Deliang Chen, the ICSU Executive Director, paid a visit to the US State Department, with the assistance of the National Academy of Sciences (ICSU's National Member in the US). The issue of visa difficulties was raised with David Donahue, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Many international scientists have experienced problems when applying for visas, particularly for attending conferences in the US. During the open discussion Mr Donahue outlined recent progress on this issue and encouraged ICSU to help identify specific cases so the problems can be redressed.

Science and the Israel-Palestine conflict

The Committee on Freedom and Responsibility of ICSU has released a statement on 'Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and the Israel-Palestine Conflict'. This statement recognises that scientific freedoms have been compromised and/or threatened in both Israel and Palestine and emphasises the responsibility of the global scientific community to promote cooperation and understanding.

Three articles and a quotation

"It was Islam that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality."
Barack Obama

Bridges is a very good science policy magazine published by the Austrian Embassy in Washington, and made available free on the Internet. Here are three articles that I found interesting:

• Reestablish the Committee on International Science, Engineering and Technology (CISET) and Get Funding for its Programs by Norman Neureiter
• Science Diplomacy Goes “Big-Time” by Norman Neureiter
• The Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) Program at the US National Science Foundation by Julia Lane

Thinking about Freedom and Development

I have been reading The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria. He seems to be making a point that has been made many times before -- that dictatorship by the mob can be very bad for individual freedom (not to mention for the quality of government). More seriously, he notes that broadly based democratic governments seem to work better if they follow a long process of constitutional liberalization which guarantees human rights.

I think more generally he is saying that an unchecked central government is likely to both fail to respect human rights and to deteriorate into authoritarianism unless checked by important forces. Among those forces are religions institutions (under a system separating church and state), businesses under private enterprise, and organized civil society. He also points out that constitutional liberalism (in the classical sense of liberal) provides undemocratic controls such as independent courts, separation of policy making and implementation in independent branches of government, and constitutional bills of rights.

He raises the question of culture, pointing out that there are a number of historical examples in which countries have instituted liberal regimes rather quickly, as was done in Germany and Japan after World War II, and in Central European nations after the fall of Communism.

The question I ask myself is, absent major outside influences, does culture determine whether the policies will be accepted and implmented necessary to produce constitutional liberalism and strong non-governmental institutions needed to balance the power of government. Perhaps the difficulty of this happening is why the successes that come to mind, outside of foreign invasion, were based on liberalizing authoritarian regimes, often imposed my military coup.

Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions

UNESCO's 2005 convention may well have been advanced by the Francophone communities anxiious to protect their creative industries from the threats of the Anglophone creative industries, but received wide support from peoples all over the world who feel that not only are their quaint old ways being threatened but even their most closely held values.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there is a lot of silliness embodied in the dogooders who become emotional over any picturesque tribe or custom. This rant is occassioned by an article regretting that a tribe in the Amazon is going to have to change its culture because its environment is changing and it will starve to death if it does not find new ways to feed itself. I suggest that with the population growth predicted for the rest of this century, mankind is also going to have to find new ways to feed itself if we are to avoid famine.

Let me illustrate the point. U.S. culture differs from that of Western Europe in many ways. Here are some of the expressions of that difference:

• We spend twice as much on health services but have lower life expectancy.
• We murder each other more often, and keep guns in our homes for protection from each other more often.
• We use a lot more oil and contribute a lot more to global warming than do the Europeans.
• We are more prejudiced against blacks and Hispanics.
• We spend more on the military. more frequently invade other countries, and over the past half century have been more often at war.

I can see why the Europeans might wish not to be more like us in these ways, but why should we not seek to be more like the Europeans?

More seriously, cultures change. They have also changed as one rubs up against another. Peoples acquire memes from their neighbors, adapt and integrate them into their own cultures, and move on. I has long seemed to me that the real issue is whether a people can choose whether and how to adopt a meme. The Japanese, who adopted and then abandoned firearms, seeem to me to be masters of socially making decisions as to what they wish to adopt and what they wish to retain of their historic culture. I would love it were Americans more like the Japanese in this way.