Why Are We So Often Passive in the Face of Need: A Thought Based on 2 Different Stories

There is an article in the Sunday Washington Post magazine by Shankar Vedantam suggesting that we can worry more about a dog left to die on a drifting ship than about mass murder in Rwanda in part because our brains are simply not evolved to comprehend disasters affecting huge numbers of people. He also summarizes an alternative explanation:

The philosopher Peter Singer once devised a dilemma that highlights a central contradiction in our moral reasoning. If you see a child drowning in a pond, and you know you can save the child without any risk to your own life -- but you would ruin a fine pair of shoes worth $200 if you jumped into the water -- would you save the child or save your shoes? Most people react incredulously to the question; obviously, a child's life is worth more than a pair of shoes.

If this is the case, Singer asked, why do large numbers of people hesitate to write a check for $200 to a reputable charity that could save the life of a child halfway around the world -- when there are millions of children who need our help? Even when people are absolutely certain their money will not be wasted and will be used to save a child's life, fewer people are willing to write the check than to leap into the pond.

Our moral responsibilities feel different in these situations; one feels immediate and visceral, the other distant and abstract. We feel personally responsible for one child, whereas the other is one of millions who need help. Our responsibility feels diffused when it comes to children in distant places -- there are many people who could write that check. But distance and diffusion of responsibility do not explain why we step forward in some cases.

The second article, by Philip Kennicott, is also in The Washington Post.

The images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those from recent natural disasters, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not clear if this reflects the magnitude and proximity of the disaster, or some change in the willingness of newspapers and other media to accurately present the full horror of the earthquake that devastated the desperately poor nation on Tuesday afternoon.

If the media follow conventions (of polity society) that result in our failure to fully appreciate the moral imperative to provide humanitarian aid, that alone might help to explain why we can donate to save a local cat or dog while remaining passive in the face of endemic hunger and disease in poor nations and even in the face of mass death that could be averted.

Of course, the mass media tend to broadcast stories that "interest" their audiences, and apparently their executives feel they can find more audience for the peccadillos of celebrities than for humanitarian crises abroad. Perhaps we should use the political and information tools at our disposal to encourage the media to be more responsible in broadcasting the important rather than the meretricious.

I find the response of President Obama to the crisis in Haiti to be an interesting exception. He has moved the U.S. Government response to cabinet level, rather than leaving it to the much lower level responsibility of USAID as has been done in the past, and has gone to the public to express concern, where many previous presidents have remained mute in the face of foreign disaster.

Could his exceptional behavior be the result of having seen the face of poverty as a child in Indonesia? Could it be a broadening of his definition of the social group with whom he feels solidarity, in part because he has learned to include relatives in Kenya and step-family in Indonesia as family? Could it be because, like Jimmy Carter, he comes from a nuclear family that feels and taught singular humanitarian impulses? Could it be because as a community development worker he lived with poverty and need in the United States?

The continual improvement of the global communications and transportation infrastructure means that people are no longer isolated by geographical location. The growing economic power of modern society means that we have increasing ability to help people in need wherever they are. The continually growing capacity of military technology implies increasing needs to learn to live in peace. It may be helpful to figure out why Obama empathizes with Haitians in order that we may encourage others to do so.

News about UN losses in Haiti

(The) 'UN mission in Haiti made new announcement about its losses during the earthquake. 36 UN workers were killed and 73 injured, 160 are still missing, including 8 workers of UNESCO mission in the country. 57-year old worker of the US State Department Victoria Delong was also among the quake victims in Haiti, US embassy’s three staff members became missing.'

Good for the U.S. Government -- some real help for Haitians

This is just out from CNN:

On Friday morning, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is to arrive in Haiti, carrying 19 helicopters and 30 pallets of relief goods......The carrier will help relief workers get around Haiti's ruined and debris-choked roads "to get good where they need to be," (Air Force Gen. Douglas) Fraser said.

Within four days, 700 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be in the quake zone. By next Tuesday, three more ships carrying 2,200 Marines and heavy equipment will join them. By Saturday, about 5,000 to 6,000 men and women dedicated to supporting the relief effort will be in Haiti.

And a week from Friday, the USNS Comfort -- a hospital ship staffed by a crew of 64 and 560 hospital personnel -- is to arriv

e.

A talk about the use of Google Mapmaker

I hope that the relief efforts in Haiti are making use of available mapping technology. I understand we had overflights providing imagery quickly after the earthquake, but it is necessary to put the information in a form relief agencies can use.

The talk goes further, however, to point out that maps can help turn land and otehr property owned by poor people into capital that they can leverage for development. Maps have a plethora of other uses, from planning public health campaigns to managing agricultural pest control, to providing better information for site location planning and urban development.

Check out this nice video from TED.

A thought about slavery

Andrew Jackson, while president, in the "nullification controversy" established that states did not have the right to nullify federal laws. The Civil War established that states did not have the right to leave the union. Neither then nullification controversy nor the Civil War was explicitly about slavery, but many people feel that it was the underlying issue. I wonder.

The Atlantic slave trade had been abolished and European nations had abolished slavery within their territories. Many southern leaders recognized that slavery would not last permanently in the United States. Would they fight to maintain slavery for a limited period.

Of course, the slaves themselves were universally opposed to slavery. Moreover, many free persons in the south did not own slaves and in fact suffered economically from slavery. Political power in the South however was controlled by an aristocratic class of slaveholders, and slavery was considerably to the interests of these who profited most from slavery.

I suggest that the aristocratic power elite in the South was seeking to maintain their way of life rather than slavery per se. Note that in Europe the abolition of serfdom had occurred without the loss of political domination by the aristocracy. As long as the economy was based on extractive industries and the aristocracy owned the land and natural resources, they maintained their way of life. So too, the southern aristocracy in the United States might have retained its way of life had slavery been slowly abolished, to be replaced by a society with strong class distinctions. Indeed, I suppose that the segregation in the south that replaced slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction had something of the same effect.

In Europe it was the rise of classes that succeeded economically from commerce and manufacturing industry that eventually competed and out-competed the landed aristocracy. In the United States the northern states were building societies based on commerce and manufacturing while the south remained an agricultural economy. I suggest that the southern aristocracy in the first half of the 19th century correctly saw their way of life threatened by the growing political power of the north, which in turn was based on a different economic base than the south's extractive agricultural industry.

Increasing numbers of people in the north correctly saw slavery as an unacceptable evil, but the controversy between north and south may well have been more about the threat to the way of life of the southern aristocracy by the social changes in the north than about slavery per se.

Even today, I suggest, the split between red states (which are more rural, with economies more based on extractive industries) and blue states (which are more urban, with economies more based on manufacturing and service industries) may be based on the different ways of life and the perceived threats to a way of life if one or the other faction gains excessive control over the machinery of the federal government.

How important were slavery and the appropriation of lands from native americans to U.S. development?

Economic growth depends importantly on investment. Income is divided between consumption and saving for investment. A relatively small shift in the division of income can make a big difference in the rate of investment. Thus, a shift of five percent of income from consumption to savings might increase investment from ten percent of income to 15 percent of income. The expropriation of land and natural resources from native Americans over centuries surely increased the income of the dominant classes in colonial America and the first century of the United States. The expropriation of the fruits of the labor of slaves kept their consumption low, allowing more savings and investment. So too, the expropriation of the fruits of the labor of poor immigrants could lead to their lower consumption and more savings.

The miracle of compound growth should be taken into account. An increase in the average rate of growth of GDP from one to two percent over 200 years means that the economy grows by a factor of 52.5 rather than a factor of 7.3. My parents came to this country long after slavery and the expropriation of Indian lands had ended, but like all Americans of my generation I am the beneficiary of the evil that was done by the American forefathers.

A proposal: A Joseph Priestly Fellowship

The State Department offers Franklin Fellowships, "a unique and innovative executive development vehicle via which the government taps citizens’ knowledge and which enables approved organizations to promote public service by their professionals". Franklin of course was a polymath, whose scientific reputation made him an especially effective diplomat.

It also offers, through the offices of the National Academies, the Jefferson Science Fellowships, which provide a model for engaging the American academic scientific, technological and engineering communities in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. Jefferson too was a polymath, effective as a diplomat, a scholar and a technological innovator.

I suggest that the State Department support a third, comparable fellowship to be named after Joseph Priestley. Priestley, a friend to both Franklin and Jefferson, was also a polymath, perhaps most famous as a scientist for his research on gases which included the discovery of Oxygen. He was also an educator, a philosopher, a religious leader and a supporter of the American Revolution in Europe. He immigrated to the United States in 1794, perhaps the first great European scientist to do so, and remained in this country until his death a decade later.

The Priestly Fellowships would be offered to citizens of other countries who would work within the U.S. foreign policy establishment on global issues of importance to the United States. Thus they might function in the science attaché of the State Department, the programs of development assistance such as those of USAID, or in the role of international health, agricultural or environmental officers.

The U.S. Government already employs foreign nationals in such roles in its missions abroad. A Priestly Fellowship program would complement these existing programs, recruiting distinguished scientists, technological innovators and engineers for limited periods, after which they would presumably return to their previous positions. The program would allow the Government to reach out to obtain services from the "best and brightest" of the global intellectual community to solve problems of global significance.

I believe that such a program, if well run, would help provide international recognition to intellectual leaders in other countries. Moreover, the scientists involved in the program would gain appreciation for the United States and make contacts with their American counterparts which they would retain on returning to their previous duties; thus a Priestley Fellowship program would be a useful element of our public diplomacy.

Book Review: American Lion: Andrew Jackson

Last night my history book club met to discuss American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. It was agreed that the book was a good read that one might recommend to others. The book is better read as a biographical sketch of Jackson during his years in the White House rather than a history of the American presidency under Jackson. Thus it focuses a great deal on his private life, and some would have rather had more focus on the policies of his presidency.

The book makes clear that Jackson was a man of great talent. Starting as a poor orphan, he accumulated a fortune, apparently in part through land dealings. Trained as a lawyer, albeit with little formal education, he became an enormously successful military leader. He appears to have led in the creation of what became the first modern political party, showing a genius for politics. He changed the nature of the presidency in important ways that influence American government to this day, showing an immense talent for governance. How many others can you think of who were so multi-talented. (OK, Franklin, Jefferson, Benjamin Thompson but early America was very lucky that way.)

Perhaps his talent was due to innovation. He seemed not to easily accept the patterns laid down by others, seeking new ways to do things at least as a general, as a politician and as a chief of government.

Jackson established for future presidents the principle that the Union was indivisible and that the federal government laws took precedence over those of the states. He established a government that was responsive to the common man rather than an aristocratic elite. These were actions that have greatly influenced the future of the United States to our own day.

He was also a slave holder and supporter of slavery. He was in favor of expulsion of native Americans from east of the Mississippi and expropriation of their lands. As vile as these policies seem now, they were widely accepted in his time. Moreover, as I just posted, they may have contributed substantially to the wealth of the modern United States. (By the way, check out this posting by Matthew Yglesias pointing out that the economic lead of the United States over most European nations dates back more than a century -- the lead that policies in the 19th century provided this country over France and Germany played a significant role in the wealth we enjoy today.)

With his limited education, I wondered whether Jackson could accurately predict the long term effects of his policies. It seems unlikely, although as my fellow club members pointed out, some of our founding fathers seem to have done so.

It seems clear that the ideas and attitudes of the people around us deeply shape what we believe and do. (Check out Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler). The attitudes of the majority of people of his time and place seem very likely to have formed Jackson's attitudes towards slavery and native Americans. In that sense we may see negative aspects of his ideas and values as excusable in a man of his time. Should we also see the positive aspects of his ideas and values as the result of the "common sense" of his time and place?

A lot of the book was devoted to the battle that broke out among the wives of Jackson's cabinet members (including his own first lady, a younger relative) which seems to have resulted in the dissolution of his cabinet. The controversy was over the suspected immorality of the wife of one cabinet member, and the women in our group seemed doubtful that such a petty issue could have such grave repercussions, or that such a dispute could have occupied as much of the president's time as Meacham suggests. I am not so sure. In that time, when women's authority outside the home was so limited, they may have been very jealous indeed of their authority within the home.

It is really hard to understand what "makes sense" in a different culture. Most of us recognize that it is really hard for Americans to fully understand the way people in the Islamic nations think. I would point out that the American culture of Jackson's time is quite different than ours, perhaps more different that that of other cultures of our own time. It is very dangerous to assume that historical figures share our opinions and values.

It was interesting last night to see people reaching for parallels in our culture to what happened in Jackson's time, seeking to impute the motives of current actions to those of similar actions of people 180 years ago. Actually, it seemed a pretty good approach. Would Jackson have had more success in controlling the actions of his White House hostess than did John Mitchell in controlling the actions of his wife Martha during the Watergate investigation? How about the response of the political elite to infidelity of current politicians?

In summary, Jackson was a fascinating man, and the book was a good read. It was useful to be reminded that even in 1830 the United States was a fragile invention, threatened by the great powers of Europe and even by Mexico. Had things gone differently then, the history of the 20th century might be very different indeed!

Innovation for Economic Development

Calestous Juma has asked me to spread the word that Harvard is offering a one week course on Innovation for Economic Development.

OVERVIEW

Click here to read a recent article by Innovation for Economic Development faculty chair Calestous Juma, entitled We Must Redesign Our Economies for Take-Off.

Technological innovation is essential for fostering economic growth, enhancing global competitiveness, and protecting the environment. The Innovation for Economic Development program at Harvard Kennedy School provides high-level leaders from government, academia, industry, and civil society with a unique opportunity to learn how to harness the power of emerging technologies to promote prosperity. The program outlines strategies and measures needed to align technological trends with development policy objectives, focusing on how to design and implement innovation policies for economic development.

Swine flu update

According to SciDev.Net:

The WHO director-general, Margaret Chan, has said that the swine flu — influenza A(H1N1) — pandemic may not be conquered until 2011.

She said it was "prudent and appropriate" to monitor the evolution of the virus for the next 12 months, Reuters reported last week (29 December).

Cases have peaked in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, she said, but are still increasing in countries such as Egypt and India.

Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's special advisor on swine flu, said last month (19 December) that logistical and regulatory issues caused delays in distributing A(H1N1) vaccines to the developing world.

Comment: We missed the bullet this year! However, there is always a chance for an antigenic shift and there remains a large portion of the global population which has not been exposed to the swine flu and might both be able to spread the disease in the future and be quite sick if infected. JAD

A New Report from the National Academies: "Choosing the Nation's Fiscal Future"

Description:

A mismatch between the federal government's revenues and spending, now and in the foreseeable future, requires heavy borrowing, leading to a large and increasing federal debt. That increasing debt raises a serious challenge to all of the goals that various people expect their government to pursue. It also raises questions about the nation's future wealth and whether too much debt could lead to higher interest rates and even to loss of confidence in the nation's long-term ability and commitment to honor its obligations. Many analysts have concluded that the trajectory of the federal budget set by current policies cannot be sustained.

In light of these projections, Choosing the Nation's Fiscal Future assesses the options and possibilities for a sustainable federal budget. This comprehensive book considers a range of policy changes that could help put the budget on a sustainable path: reforms to reduce the rate of growth in spending for Medicare and Medicaid; options to reduce the growth rate of Social Security benefits or raise payroll taxes; and changes in many other government spending programs and tax policies. The book also examines how the federal budget process could be revised to be more far sighted and to hold leaders accountable for responsible stewardship of the nation's fiscal future.

Choosing the Nation's Fiscal Future will provide readers with a practical framework to assess budget proposals for their consistency with long-term fiscal stability. It will help them assess what policy changes they want, consistent with their own values and their views of the proper role of the government and within the constraints of a responsible national budget. It will show how the perhaps difficult but possible policy changes could be combined to produce a wide range of budget scenarios to bring revenues and spending into alignment for the long term. This book will be uniquely valuable to everyone concerned about the current and projected fiscal health of the nation.

"Cut This Story"

Michael Kinsley has this article in the current edition of The Atlantic. He makes the key point in the opening paragraph (as a good journalist should):

ONE REASON SEEKERS of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

His primary gripe seems to be described here:

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it.

He also complains about just plane bad writing, and about flowery additions that provide no information to the reader. In all of this he is of course correct.

I have another gripe. Let me illustrate with paragraphs three, four and five of the lead story from today's Washington Post, on the earthquake in Haiti. I choose this because it is the lead story from a nationally important paper which also happens to be my local paper. William Branigin and Michael D. Shear write:

"People are out in the streets, crying, screaming, shouting," said Karel Zelenka, director of the Catholic Relief Services office in Haiti. "They see the extent of the damage," he said, but could do little to rescue people trapped under rubble because night had fallen.

"There are a lot of collapsed buildings," Zelenka said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince. "This will be a major, major disaster."

He reported that poorly constructed shantytowns and other buildings had crumbled in huge clouds of dust. Near the CRS headquarters, a supermarket was "completely razed," he said, and a gasoline station and a church were reduced to rubble. Among the worst-hit areas was the impoverished Carrefour section of Port-au-Prince near the sea.

The writers apparently seek a "pleasing verisimilitude" by quoting a person who is on the scene. Unfortunately, with the electricity off and radios and televisions not working, the person on the scene has very little important information for the Washington or the American reader. In this case, the interviewee was not only a victim of the quake himself but also an official of an agency that would be expected to provide relief services to other victims, and later might be able to provide real information. (The TV coverage, with a huge amount of time to fill, interviewed people who had recently returned from Haiti and people with family members in Haiti -- people who had even less real information to share with the audience.)

Of course when a magnitude 7 earthquake occurs at a shallow depth within a few miles of city center of a city with two and a half million desperately poor people there will be a lot of deaths, a lot of people panicking, and a lot of property damage. Quantitative data would be informative, but of course quantitative information was not available when the edition went to press.

On the Internet, one could read that the quake had happened. One could check on a photo gallery to see for oneself some examples of the damage that had been done. Indeed, one could check Google Videos for film coverage of the earthquake.

So people are reading the newspapers less and using the Internet more! When the American revolution took place two centuries ago, communications were poor and newspapers often published news that was weeks old but which had just arrived locally. News magazines took over the job of publishing news that was days old, but to compete with newspapers had to take a different, more analytic slant. Now, I suggest, newspapers should do the same thing, recognizing that the Internet and broadcast media to provide minute by minute information, and finding a niche in which the newspaper provides more thoughtful and analytical information as to what the news "means". Maybe newspapers should be smaller, not with less news, but with news stories better written, shorter, and focused on what the factual information in the story means.

Knowledge is not only internalized data and information, but understanding. We need to know what the facts and images mean. Information systems need to adapt to changing technology. The newspaper has to adapt not only to the better means that its reporters use to get information and the better technology to disseminate that information, but to the changing competition from other media as they also adopt improved technology.

Knowledge systems go beyond information systems as they focus not only on the communication of information, but on helping users to create knowledge. Knowledge systems too change with the technology, and the role of the newspaper in 21st century knowledge systems will surely be different than it was in 20th century knowledge systems. Lets hope it is better in the sense of helping to impart useful knowledge efficiently, and not simply in the sense of making money for the owners of the media.

A Funny Talk With a Bite For Those of Us Who Work in Schools

Thoughts About Foreign Aid

My friend Julianne pointed out an article in Foreign Affairs magazine by Jagdish Bhagwati. It is a review of a new book by an African born economist, Dambisa Moyo, and Bhagwati makes the useful point that we need to hear more from knowledgeable Africans about development policy.

Bhagwati writes:

Foreign aid rests on two principles: that it should be given as a moral duty and that it should yield beneficial results.

Comment: I doubt that anyone feels that aid should be given as a moral duty if the aid doesn't actually help people "in need". If there is a moral duty it is to help people, or at least to make a serious effort to do so.

On the other hand, U.S. foreign aid is often given to achieve objectives such as enhancing U.S. national security or developing foreign markets for American products. Again, it would be foolish to give money for such purposes if you knew in advance that the means would not lead to the desired ends.

Development is extremely complex, and my reading is that economic models that try to develop predictive approaches to foreign aid allocation or justification tend to be too simple to be trusted. (A project economic analysis I worked on won a prize by pointing out that if the project only succeeded in wiping out the bureaucratic impediments to efficient operations introduced by the previous project, it would have economic returns that justified its costs.)

One of the key findings after years of analysis is that financial indicators don't tell the whole story of the impact of foreign aid. The elimination of smallpox and the effect of the green revolution in avoiding famine in Asia can't be properly measured on financial terms. We might be able to measure how much it has cost to explosively expand educational opportunities in developing nations, but how do you put a dollar value on the benefits people have felt from the education they received, benefits that include not only increased lifetime earnings but also the consumer benefits of better understanding their world and being better able to manage the non-economic aspects of their lives.

A problem that I perceive often is that time frames in which results are measured are far too short. Politicians, who will run for election every 2, 4 or 6 years, tend to think in time frames bounded by elections. The development of the United States might best be measured in terms of centuries, and is still continuing. So too, the development of Asia and Africa is going to take a long time. Indeed, many of the important investments may not have evident returns in a few years, but may pay off in a few decades. (Think about the benefits from electification which took 4 decades to begin to pay off, or those from computerization which came after a similar delay.)

I liked Bhagwati's comment that there is a moral hazard in development aid, in that rewards to the practitioners of aid are often based on programming and spending money, and not on the much more difficult to measure effects likely to flow from that money.

It may be important to recognize our limited rationality. It is certainly important to recognize the multiple objectives of foreign aid. Indeed, the objectives of donors may differ one from another, as the objectives of donors and intermediaries often differ one from another. Thats life! But the number of people living in abject poverty is less now than it might have been, and some of the worst aspects of such poverty have been ameliorated.

Sports Illustrated Editor Demo of the Power of the Tablet Computer

My friend Julianne pointed out this YouTube video on the coming power of online magazines provided by new tablet technology.

Four from the past

I was surprised to find links on the Internet to four reports that I helped write in the early 1970s when I worked with the Office of International Health.

• With Martha Anderson and Lyndall Beamer, Syncrisis, the dynamics of health: Tunisia
• With Arne Barkhuss, Syncrisis, the dynamics of health: VI, Haiti (revised)
• With Karen Lashman, Syncrisis, the dynamics of health: 9. the Dominican Republic
• With Rose Britanak and Joe Davis, Syncrisis, the dynamics of health: 8, Ethiopia

The latter two of these are available in full from USAID's Development Information Clearinghouse.

A Thought About Book Culture in the Former Ottoman Empire

Books and printed matter in Turkish and Arabic were unknown before the end of the 18th century, and even then they were of limited impact because of widespread illiteracy. Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition established a Hebrew printing press about 1494. Armenians had a press in 1567, and Greeks had press in 1627. These presses were no allowed to print in Turkish or in Arabic characters, owing to objections of the religious authorities. One result of this delay was to give Greeks, Armenians and Jews an advantage in literacy, and therefore an advantage in commerce, and in having a means to preserve and propagate their culture, that was denied to Turks and Arabs. The major result was to retard the development of modern literate society, commerce and industry. The first Turkish printing press in the Ottoman Empire was not established until 1729. It was closed in 1742 and reopened in 1784. The press operated under heavy censorship throughout most of the Ottoman era.

Source: Encyclopedia of the Middle East

It seems to me that the Ottoman Empire that included most of North Africa, the Middle East and some of South Eastern Europe doomed itself to an intellectual gap with the West just as the West was taking off intellectually by this policy of the Ottoman Empire.

I wonder how long it takes to build a literate culture with strong use of written communication and strong use of books in education and professional training. Clearly it requires generations simply to build the human and institutional resources. I suspect that the cultural change may take longer still.

A Thought on Judicial Knowledge Systems

The jury deliberates in 12 Angry Men

The Washington Post today has an article that deals with an impact of the Information Revolution on U.S. courts. It provides an

example of how modern technology and an information-saturated culture are testing centuries-old notions of how juries and judges mete out justice. The issue garnered national attention recently in Baltimore, where five jurors were accused of using a social-networking site to inappropriately discuss the ongoing trial of the city's mayor.

Judges and legal experts are particularly concerned about how technology and culture are affecting jurors and a defendant's right to a fair trial. The Internet has provided easy and instant access to newspaper archives, criminal records, detailed maps, legal opinions and social-networking sites, such as Facebook, all at the anonymous click of a mouse in jurors' homes or on the tiny keyboards of their cellular phones.

Trial by jury in a criminal matter is intended to reach the best possible decision as to the guilt of the defendant(s). It seems to me that the courts should utilize information and communications technology as effectively as possible to inform the jurors and to help them analyze the evidence.

The adversarial process of course encourages the prosecuting and defense lawyers to present their evidence using the best available technology. I suspect, however, that they may have a bias toward convincing jurors of the quality of their theses rather than maximizing the information available.

The court would seem to have little incentive to utilize information and communications technology to improve communication with the jurors. Nor do I see courts having any incentive to utilize technology to improve the process of jury deliberation.

It would seem useful for legislative bodies to consider whether the courts are being overly traditional in their failure to use information and communications technology and to consider whether changes in the law would encourage technological improvements to enhance the quality of jury decisions.

An example of the power of social networking

Source: "Breast cancer awareness goes viral on Facebook . . . with bra color updates," Brigid Schulte, The Washington Post, January 9, 2010.

(T)he people at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, who were stunned to find themselves the beneficiaries of a Web phenomenon they didn't begin to understand. At the start of Friday, they had exactly 135 fans on their Facebook page. By 5:30 in the evening, they had 135,000.

Somebody, somewhere -- no one knows who or where -- got the bright idea of getting women to reveal the colors of their bras on social networking sites. The fad boomed, was linked to support for the fight against breast cancer, and as a result there was a huge boost in fandom for breast cancer websites and a modest increase in donations for breast cancer research.

Ask Marilyn Wrong?

In today's Parade magazine's problem column, Ask Marilyn, she gives the mini problem of drawing two cards from four, two of which are aces and two of which are deuces. She suggests that the probability of drawing a pair of aces is one quarter, that the probability of drawing a pair of deuces is one quarter, and that the probability of drawing an ace and a deuce is one half. I get those probabilities as being one sixth, one sixth and two thirds.

I really begin to doubt her accuracy on questions of probability.

Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases

The OECD STI Report 2009

Source: OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009

The data in this report is generally from 2007, but there is a lot on the effect of the global economic crisis. Here are some paragraphs from the Highlights report:

Research and development (R&D) expenditures are among the first to be cut during recessions. Preliminary data suggest that companies have reduced their R&D investment in the aftermath of the crisis. Companies quoted on the New York Stock Exchange report a reduction of about 7% in their R&D expenditures in the first quarter of 2009, with a slight increase in the subsequent quarter. The semiconductor industry, which is at the core of the information and communication technology (ICT) industries, appears particularly affected by the recession, with a drop in R&D over the first semester of 2009 exceeding 13%.....

Innovation will be also negatively affected by the drop in foreign direct investment (FDI) due to the crisis. FDI inflows to G7 countries dropped by 25% in 2008. In the first quarter of 2009 the decrease accelerated in Canada (–97%), Germany (–67%), Italy (–41%), Japan (–59%) and the United States (–63%). On the contrary, FDI inflows to the United Kingdom more than doubled in the first quarter of 2009, back to the same level as the previous year.....

In 2004-06, the United States confirmed its world leadership in medical technologies,
accounting for almost half of patented inventions worldwide, twice as many as the European Union. Israel accounted for 2.7%, twice its share in total patents (1.3%). Additionally, the United States had more than 42% of pharmaceutical patents in the mid-2000s. China and India together accounted for nearly 5% of patents in pharmaceuticals over the period.

Share Prices Recover

From The Economist, without comment!

A thought on translation

Eric Baković posted "Translate at your own risk" on the Language Log yesterday. The posting is worth reading, especially for those who need to trust Google translate, which is indeed a great resource. In the post, he quotes a comment on another posting:

However, there exists an important activity which clearly shows that even though the ways languages grasp the world may vary widely from one language to another, they all build, in fact, the same contents, and equivalent conceptions of the world. This activity is translation. Any text in any language can be translated into a text in another language. These two texts express the same meaning. We can therefore conclude that despite the differences between the ways languages grasp the world, all languages are easily convertible into one another, because humans interpret the world along the same, or comparable, semantic lines.

It occurs to me that in any communication there may well be a difference between what the sender understands the communication to mean and what the recipient understands it to mean. If the sender and recipient come from different cultures, as is most likely when translation is necessary, the difference in perception of meaning between sender and recipient is bound to be influenced by their cultural differences.

Think of the use of the word "crusade" as used by a Christian and heard by a Muslim!

If one is talking about a mathematical proof, perhaps the gap is not too large betwen what is meant and what is understood. If one it talking about emotions, the gap may be large indeed.

Why Do Egyptian Women Wear the Hijab?

Image source: The Hijab Blog

I am watching a television news program asking this question. In part the answer is in the negative -- the Koran does not require women to wear that garment and a few years ago very few "modern" women in Egypt did so. I myself noted how great the difference had been in the numbers of women wearing the hijab between the 1980s and the decade of the "oughts".

I also noticed that the hijabs tended to be carefully color coordinated with dresses and that to the uninformed they looked more like a fashion statement than like a religious statement.

I recall in my youth "the new look" replaced short skirts with much longer skirts in America. It would have been laughable to describe that as an increase in modesty with religious roots.

Maybe the better answer as to why Egyptian women wear the hijab is that it is the fashion to do so!

More on the Decline of the Washington Post

Amanda Silverman has an article in The New Republic describing how a new partnership between the WP and The Financial Times, an organization financed by Pete Peterson's Foundation, led to the publication of a Financial Times article quoting officials of other organizations funded by Pete Peterson's Foundation, which supported policies long advocated by Pete Peterson. One problem with the article apparently was that it did not acknowledge the financing from Peterson's surrogates.

Silverman writes:

In TFT’s defense, Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli told the Times that the Post editors were the ones to “conceive” the story and then commissioned TFT to write it.

Comment: I don't think that a partnership with another organization relieves WP editors from the responsibility of acknowledging interests, especially financial interests, behind the articles it publishes, especially if they are published as news.

Silverman suggests that others feel even more strongly:

Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that in publishing the piece The Washington Post had ceased to exist as “a serious newspaper,” and subsequently over a dozen wonks and academics called for the Post to end its partnership with the “propaganda arm for ideologues.”

U.S. Development Assistance Policy

The Obama administration is conducting a Presidential Study on Global Development Policy. The State Department Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review will also focus on foreign assistance policy. The testimony of the new Administrator of USAID, Rajiv Shah, at his confirmation hearing also provides information on the changes in Foreign Assistance.

A Contentious Drug Trial in India

There is an interesting article in Frontline (a magazine published by The Hindu in India) on the ethics of a drug trial that was conducted in India in 2001, which involved Johns Hopkins University researchers, at least in the analysis of tissue samples from tumors injected with experimental drugs before being excised from the patients. It is charged that the experimental drugs had not been subjected to sufficient animal tests before being used in human subjects, that they in fact had serious side effects, that the consent obtained from the subjects was not informed, and that the research had not been subject to appropriate ethical review prior to the treatment of the human subjects. It is also suggested that there might be significant profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals resulting from this and follow on research, and that inappropriate statements of the distribution of such profits had been made suggesting that the Indian institution involved in the research would benefit significantly from those profits.

Here is a preliminary finding from NIH on the behavior of Johns Hopkins University requiring changes in university processes, and the later letter stating that the university had complied.

Comment: It is hard to figure out what actually happened from the material at hand. It seems likely that there were several real problems -- inadequately tested drugs, poor communication between physicians and patients and between JHU and Indian researchers, and inadequate ethical review of the research. It may well be the case that all of these problems occurred due to lack of experience and may represent uninformed rather than unethical behavior by the people involved. History if full of examples of people behaving in ways that now look unethical, but which they did not recognize as immoral at the time.

I spent a lot of time over 15 years trying to assure that research funded by my office was the subject of ethical review, and thus was to the extent possible to assure conducted ethically. We funded a lot of collaborative international research, and developed a policy that any research had to survive ethical review in both countries involved. We did so not only for research involving human subjects, but for research involving laboratory or wild animals or livestock, research involving dangerous substances, or research that might have environmental impacts.

This was during the period 1982 through 1998. We often had to get overseas organizations to set up review committees. We ourselves had to learn a great deal in the process. Of course, the ideas as to what is really "informed consent" and what risks are acceptable to obtain what potential benefits vary from culture to culture. Lots of researchers seem to feel assured of their own morality and saw our efforts as bureaucratic obstacles put in the way of expeditious conduct of their research.

There were some funny instances in my experience. For example, mosquito vector research often involve setting out people as baits for mosquitoes which are caught when they bite. We were assured by a number of investigators that they would follow WHO guidelines on the treatment of the human baits (presumably informed consent and provision of prophylactic and curative drugs) before learning that there were no such guidelines. Similarly, a researcher who had planned to collect samples of a dozen plant species from the wild for pharmaceutical screening, when asked noted that half of the species were endangered.

In my days working in a research lab many years ago, I recall a couple of colleagues who had been exposed to very high levels of radiation in their labs, a couple who were badly injured in a laboratory explosion, the release of gases from the lab that killed nearby livestock, and a gas cylinder tearing through a couple of walls and laboratories. In this country we have spent generations institutionalizing systems to reduce the dangers of research to the researchers themselves, to the people around the research, to the subjects of research and to the environment. We have worked hard to balance the safety requirements with the need not to hinder the conduct of important research with potential benefits to the public and society.

It is perhaps not surprising that poor countries, which have much less experience with the conduct of research, have not developed comparably extensive and effective institutions. Helping to build such capacity should be a significant part of donor assistance for science and technology capacity building.

In this respect, I find the action of UNESCO's programs in bioethics and the ethics of science and technology to be falling short. I would love to see UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and other UN agencies take on the job of helping developing nations to build the capacity for ethical review of research and development, and indeed to build the capacity to do R&D ethically.

Have you heard about Shibuya University?

Shibuya is the entertainment center of Tokyo. Started in 2006, Shibuya University holds courses anywhere in the district -- stores, malls, temples, anywhere. There is little distinction between faculty and students, and anyone can teach a course. Students sign up for courses on the University website. There are no degrees or certificates, nor enrollment requirements. While most students are young adults, it is hoped that eventually people of all ages will participate in its continuing education. Students don't pay for classes, but do pay for materials if they make something. The University, which needs little money to run, gets a small subsidy from a local council company that supports service companies in Shibuya and contributions from local businesses.

Check out:

• An interview with Yasuaki Sakyo, president of Shibuya University
• A CNN story on the University

You have to run fast to stay where you are!

The New York Times has an article stating that Asian technology firms "have moved well beyond manufacturing to seize greater control over the look and feel of tomorrow’s personal computers, smartphones and even Web sites." The author says:

The investments by Asian companies have already started to pay off. At the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, people will see laptops that end sluggish start times and instead boot up instantly and TVs that do not require remotes because they can see the gestures of viewers. These features are a result of strategic investments in technology by Asian manufacturers.

The ICT industry has not dried up for American firms, stockholders and jobs, but the current economic crisis will help us to lose competitiveness in the industry. The developing countries have done better in the crisis than the developed nations, and will probably invest in this technology and climb "the innovation ladder".

If we want to continue to have a vibrant, exporting economy we better invest not only in ICT but in Energy, Health and Environmental industries, and push hard to develop areas such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the technologies of cognitive enhancement.

“Choice, Social Class, and Agency”

My friend Julianne suggested this interesting talk by Nicole Stephens. Let me summarize several points that I believe she makes and that are importantL

• Poor people often have fewer real alternatives to chose among than do more affluent people from the same culture.
• Poor people tend to focus more on community with others as compared to middle class Americans who focus more on self-actualization goals in making choices.
• Middle class institutions tend to institutionalize the assumption of middle class values and middle class decision making.
• In doing so, they create institutions that are less welcoming to the poor.
• Middle class people tend to blame the poor for bad choices when the poor may in fact have had or perceived little choice, or to have made choices which were rational under their value systems.

Although she does not say so, blaming the victims is a means of avoiding blame for the people who had the power to ameliorate the risks in the first place. Thus the politicians who blamed the victims of Hurricane Katrina were not coincidentally unwilling to shoulder the blame for allowing the conditions to exist in which the risks were created for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The perception that the poor may be more likely to choose the course chosen by their friends and neighbors than are those in the middle class is quite important. So too is the recognition that the middle class (doctors, lawyers, government bureaucrats, etc.) may often misunderstand the values that the poor will utilize in choosing alternatives.

Mobile Phone Penetration

Source: "Mobile-phone culture: The Apparatgeist calls," The Economist, December 30th 2009

Now a further mobile-phone revolution is under way, driven by the iPhone and other “smart” handsets which let users gain access to the internet and download mobile applications, including games, social-networking programs, productivity tools and much else besides. Smart-phones accounted for over 13% of the 309m handsets shipped in the third quarter of 2009. Some analysts estimate that by 2015 almost all shipped handsets will be smart. Mobile operators have started building networks which will allow for faster connection speeds for an even wider variety of applications and services.

The article considers the cultural differences in cell phone use that exist now, and the possibility that there will be a cultural convergence in cell phone use as more general cultural convergence leads to common needs for personal telecoms.

Comment: Surely cell phones are changing the way we live, as the changes in the way we live are driving changes in our use of the technology.

I was struck by the fact that there are now more cell phones in the United States than there are people, in spite of the fact that we also have a high penetration of land line telephones. The situation may be more extreme than that. We have two land lines and three cell phones in the house but we also have a router for internet communication for the four personal computers that are in regular use and another for six handset telephones. I don't know what the limit will be for telecom connections per person, but it will probably be quite high as we wire (wireless?) appliances to the Internet and they communicate among themselves.

In developing countries there remains a telephone divide based on poverty, as many people still don't have telephones or even good access to public phones, and consequently systems have not evolved to allow transactions via telephone to the same extent that they exist in the North. JAD

A Thought about the evolution of the brain

You read every once and a while that the human brain has not changed in 200,000 years. (Here is an example.) Marvin Minsky in his recent book describes the brain as composed of a number of "resources". He writes:

every brain has hundreds of parts, each of which evolved to do certain particular kinds of jobs; some of them recognize situations, others tell muscles to execute actions, others formulate goals and plans, and yet others accumulate and use enormous bodies of knowledge. And though we don’t yet know much about how each of those hundreds of brain-centers works, we do know that their construction is based on information that is contained in tens of thousands of inherited genes—so that each brain-parts works in a way that depends on a somewhat different set of laws.

We also know, however, that brain organization is flexible. Thus we know that a musician's brain shows different patterns of activity when that person hears music than does a non-musician's brain exposed to the same music. We know that after a stroke or other injury to the brain a person can relearn things that have been lost to the injury -- that other parts of the brain will take over some of the functions previously carried out by the injured sections.

The genetic coding for the brain seems to result in the same function being carried out in about the same location in the brains of different people. However, experience and training can effect how much of the brain is allocated to each of the functions.

Think then about a modern American who has perhaps attended school for 14 years on average and read a great many books and magazines. That person has listened to many thousands of hours of music, and watched many thousands of hours of movies and television. Would the allocations of functions to parts of the brain be the same as those of a human say 150.000 years ago. At a gross level perhaps, but I would guess that more of the modern brain would be devoted to language, that the links between visual centers and language centers would be far more developed, and that more of the brain would be devoted to the interpretation of two dimensional moving images than would be the case of a paleo-human hunter gatherer.

It seems to me that culture would influence the allocation of functions within the brain, and that tens of thousands of years of evolution of culture would in fact change the brain.

Minsky suggests further:

Each of our major “emotional states” results from turning certain resources on while turning certain others off—and thus changing some ways that our brains behave.

If the functioning of the brain is based on patterns of activation over the hundreds of different parts, and culture influences the size of the regions of the brain allocated to different parts, so too culture might be assumed to modify the pattern of activity across those parts.

If you think about it, computer software works by influencing the physical properties of computer hardware. Storing a one or a zero is done by changing the state of a memory unit. The change in a computer's behavior with a change in software (say from an Internet browser to a word processor) is simply the result of a change in its physical state.

So too the changes in the behavior of the brain seem likely to be the result of changes in the physical properties of the brain -- such as changes in synaptic strength. It seems likely that the state of the modern American brain is different from the state of the paleo-human hunter gatherer brain not so much due to evolutionary changes as to changes in experience that are the result of millennia of cultural development, a process that is much more rapid than evolutionary changes.

I would now guess, which I would not have done a generation ago, that the changes in structure may be so macro as to be observable were we to have a paleo-human hunter gatherer for comparison.

The Valur of Being Nice

There is a nice posting by Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist of the Financial Times, on the economic importance of being nice. I quote one paragraph:

It is not clear how a government might encourage people to be nicer, but one famous economic study does suggest a way: Ray Fisman and Ted Miguel looked at the behaviour of diplomats in New York. The Scandinavians committed 12 unpaid parking violations between them; diplomats from Chad and Bangladesh notched up over 2,500. But when the city was given more power to punish offenders, all the diplomats cleaned up their act – niceness is best supported by legal incentives.

I suspect that niceness can be usefully supported by media campaigns, as was done in New York to make The Big Apple friendlier to tourists. On the other hand, the economic cost of people not obeying traffic laws is so obvious and large that legal regulation is imposed in most efficient large cities.

Malaria is still a huge problem in Africa!

The most detailed map ever created of malaria risk worldwide has been published by an international team of researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Check out the top ten SciDev.Net stories of 2009

I especially draw your attention to the following paragraph from the article:

Facts and figures features occupied three of our top ten spots this year, the other two being Climate change and insect-borne disease: Facts and figuresand Funding for higher education: Facts and figures. Our readers evidently value our ability to gather, analyse and distil.

What's wrong with this picture?

Source

The Water Crisis in India

I notice that BBC is giving more emphasis to the opening of the new skyscraper in Dubai than to the water crisis in the Indian subcontinent. At least BBC is mentioning the crisis. Here are some relevant websites:

• Water crisis could result in Indo-Pak war: Aseff
• Terrifying water crisis faces India; most cities to run dry
• Water crisis dampens Mumbai realty
• IMMINENT WATER CRISIS IN INDIA

Check out the Water.com website for its work in India.

Hebe Vessuri to head new university program

Global Higher Ed informs me that 10 Professorial Chairs have been appointed to Brazil's Federal University for Latin America Integration (UNILA). Each Chair has a mandate to develop courses in ways that are inspired by, and advance, the intellectual legacy of a "Patron"--a person distinguished for academic-scientific contributions to knowledge.

For instance, in the area of science, technology and innovation, founding Chair, Hebe Vessuri, will draw inspiration from the patron Amilcar Herrerra (1920-1995) – an Argentinean geologist who valued inter-disciplinary knowledge and who have argued that the solution to problems lay not with science as progress, but in the interface with policy and politics.

On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up

Chris Mooney has an op/ed piece in today's Washington Post calling on scientists to communicate more with the public, especially on controversial issues in the public eye. His case is based on the fact that the proponents of the non-scientific or even anti-scientific views are quite willing to use the media to influence public opinion, but that scientists tend to protect their credibility by making very careful and nuanced statements or avoiding the media entirely. He also writes:

According to a recent Pew study, 85 percent of U.S. scientists say it's a "major problem" that the public doesn't know much about science, and 76 percent say the same about what they see as the media's inability to distinguish between well-supported science and less-than-scientific claims. Rather than spurring greater efforts at communication, such mistrust and resignation have further motivated some scientists to avoid talking to reporters and going on television.

They no longer have that luxury. After all, global-warming skeptics suffer no such compunctions. What's more, amid the current upheaval in the media industry, the traditional science journalists who have long sought to bridge the gap between scientists and the public are losing their jobs en masse. As New York Times science writer Natalie Angier recently observed, her profession is "basically going out of existence." If scientists don't take a central communications role, nobody else with the same expertise and credibility will do it for them.

I have been writing about climate change research, but let me also now follow Mooney's advice and write about evolution,

The Theory of Evolution is the keystone of modern biology, and there is almost two centuries of accumulated evidence from thousands of scientists attesting to the validity of the theory. I have written in the past that the intellectual demonstration -- that a process combining random variation and selection for success can lead to designs of great beauty -- was important itself; that insight has led to useful computer design approaches as well to selective breeding of improved crops. While scientists are always looking for ways that theory can be improved, the theory of evolution is as likely to be true as anything we believe we know.

Those in the Christian tradition who oppose the teaching of the theory of evolution apparently do so because they believe that it is inconsistent with the bible. There is a religious tenant that makes sense to me. Clearly people differ in the interpretation of the bible, so it should be clear that devote Christians can at least misinterpret the bible. It has been suggested that if someone believes that the bible is revealed truth, and believes that the bible is in conflict with something that appears to be factual, that person has probably misinterpreted the bible.

So one considers the probabilities that:

• The scientists have misinterpreted the evidence
• The individual has misinterpreted the science
• The individual has misinterpreted the bible or
• The bible as read by the individual has been misinterpreted by the translators

For people who know little of the science certainly the second alternative is more likely than the first. I suspect that many of the self proclaimed bible experts are indeed less than expert on the bible and likely to be misinterpreting it.

We need more DARPAs and less bureaucratic research organizations

Henry Petroski, who has written some nice books on engineering issues, has published a review in the WP of The Department of Mad Scientists': How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs by Michael Belfiore. DARPA is the least bureaucratic of U.S. Government agencies funding engineering research and development of new technologies, and is also one of the most successful having pioneered the Internet and GPS technologies among others. Lets hope that the ARPA-E for energy technology, developed by the Department of Energy on the model of DARPA, will be comparably successful.

The Global Information Society: a Statistical View

While almost two years old, this is an interesting report by the consortium of organizations seeking to improve indicators for measurement of the key aspects of the information society.

Rich Financial Lives of Poor People

Science magazine has Anirudh Krishna's review of Portfolios of the Poor How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. Krishna writes:

Far from being disconnected from the market economy, poor households, including those living on less than one dollar a day, are deeply invested in financial transactions. Because these transactions are mostly informal, thus undocumented, they remain invisible to one-time visitors and others who look at written records. But if one were to take the trouble of visiting households twice a month over the course of a year, recording the details of all financial transactions, then one would recognize how diligently poor people, using a variety of instruments, manage their portfolios. Conducting such an exercise for 300 households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, the authors of Portfolios of the Poor found that a "triple whammy" characterizes the financial lives of the poor. Incomes are not only low; they are also irregular and unpredictable. Large expenditures arise suddenly on account of illnesses, deaths, insect infestations, and demolition drives. Inflows and outflows of money can be, and quite often are, severely mismatched over time.

Yet, as the authors document, only very blunt tools are available for smoothing cash flows. All poor households set aside money in savings, but they tend to store these savings in unproductive and insecure forms: "Mumtaz in a locked box in a drawer in the cupboard, Subir in a cloth bag tied into the roof timbers." Short-term consumption loans, necessitated by force of circumstance, are most often taken out from relatives and friends and, if need be, from informal moneylenders, who charge high interest rates.

It sounds as if institutionalizing appropriate mechanisms to create rights in property that poor people own and financial institutions to allow them to capitalize that property would do a lot of good for poor people and indeed for poor countries. The problem is that were such institutions easy to create, they probably would have evolved over past centuries. Evolutionary processes that take place over centuries are quite powerful, and it is probably an illusion that we can analytically invent better institutions in a year or a decade.

Still, do you have a better idea? Certainly we have expanded the reach and reduced transaction costs in financial institutions serving the middle classes greatly in recent years using both technological and process innovations, and while some of those innovations are showing up with major problems, there is a hope we can extend the innovations down to serve the poor.

There they go again worrying about the wrong things!

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Spencer Ackerman tries to problematize the conclusion that the underpants bomber incident really represents a grievous intelligence failure. You should read his whole analysis. But in brief, while by definition letting a bomber on an airplane is a failure, based on what was actually known about Abdulmutallab, excluding him from flying would involve erecting pretty substantial barriers to entering the United States in ways that would have real costs. As I said before, the key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes’ theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.

Looking at it one way, he is right. Looking at it another way, he is quite wrong.

• Any simple, affordable screening method that seeks to unfailingly identify anyone among nearly seven billion people who would create a specific type of crime anytime and anywhere is bound to fail to achieve that hugely unreasonable goal.
• I think the number of false positives among people who are convicted in the courts of attempted terrorist acts is very small indeed.

In fact screening is generally a sequential process. Simply saying that we are seeking Al Qaeda operatives is itself a screening step. Screening for Al Qaeda operatives is unlikely to identify another Oklahoma City bomber or serial killer. We screen lots of people with simple tools giving lots of false positives, and put them on a watch list. We screen the smaller number of people who ask for U.S. visas more carefully. Those who do receive visas are screened still more carefully for explosives and weapons when they seek to board an airplane. If charged with a crime, they should be investigated very thoroughly indeed. Ultimately, before finding a person guilty, prosecutors will have to decide that there is enough evidence to bring the person to trial, a judge will have to decide that the investigation and presentation of evidence has been fair, and a jury will have to decide if the case has been made beyond a reasonable doubt.

The point is, screening is a sequential process with more expensive and more accurate processes being applied following prescreening with simpler cheaper processes. Think about medical screening where one goes through a physicians office visit and stages of clinical laboratory work -- chest x-ray followed by CT scan and then by exploratory surgery -- before a final diagnosis is made.

The more fundamental point is that we are probably doing a poor job of risk analysis, spending too much money to avoid relatively small risks and too little money to avoid relatively large risks. We probably worry too much about Al Qaeda and too little about traffic accidents, communicable diseases, and behavior that creates risks of non-communicable disease such as cardio-vascular disease and cancer. The publicity that attends a failed attack to blow up an airplane dwarfs that which attends the thousands of deaths a year from flu, not to mention heart attacks, strokes and cancer. So our political leaders pander to public opinion with new programs to prevent the uncommon, ignoring the more common risks!

More about Knowledge Systems

In my last posting I focused on knowledge systems in various institutions. I have been reading a great book, The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which gives a fictional but I think very accurate picture of leadership during the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. It exemplifies, almost as a side issue, an important part of the knowledge system of the military, army intelligence. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia depended on cavalry lead by Jeb Stewart for intelligence about the Union forces of the Army of the Potomac. Stewart, according to the book, went off on an extended raid into Pennsylvania leaving the Confederate army blind, a dereliction of duty so serious that a number of Confederate generals asking Robert E. Lee to court marshal Stewart. Of course the military has other knowledge systems such as those dealing with logistics, personnel, and facilities but military intelligence is crucial when the military actually engages in battle.

I guess, like many people, I first thought of knowledge systems in the context of formal organizations, and the prototypical models for large formal organizations are the military and the church.

I suppose that Catholics and Protestants differ fundamentally with regard to their knowledge systems: Protestants ascribe authority primarily to the bible and the individual's reading of the translated texts while Catholics ascribe authority more to the interpretations and analyses of members of the church hierarchy, especially of the Pope. I don't know much about Islam, but clearly the Koran is central to the theology of the religion, but fatwas issued by religious authorities also have a place in the Muslim knowledge system. Perhaps all the world religions reach their own balance between the authority of written sources and that of authorities who have special knowledge and legitimization within the structure of the religious organization.

Other institutions also have their own knowledge systems. Consider for example the market. A market is not a formal institution but has its own knowledge system. A stock market, for example, has a system which allows potential buyers and sellers to track the prices of stock transactions, as well as a system that helps buyers and sellers find each other. We also find ancillary systems such as the information provided by companies, information which is warranted by auditors and regulated by the government.

I would suggest that even the most informal organizations, such as communities, include knowledge systems. I suppose the social networks that are so important to the Internet exemplify such knowledge systems. There is both a way to find information about members of the community, and ways to communicate information among members.

In the process of social and economic development, then, development of the knowledge systems becomes critically important, yet seldom recognized function.

An Aside On Arab Knowledge Systems

Incidentally, I have just been reading "What Arabs Read: A Pan-Arab Survey on Readership" by Hany Hanafy. He is an Egyptian professor of English literature, and in the paper he comments on a 2007 survey of reading habits in Arab nations. He suggests that Egyptians read very little, and that a significant portion of their reading may be the Koran but that few can easily understand the classical Arabic in which the Koran is written. Moreover, Egyptians apparently write less than the world average, and thus much less than do people in the most text emphasizing cultures.

If people don't read and write they tend to lose the ability to do so. Think about the implications for the plethora of knowledge systems on which a society must depend. Communication is more oral and less written. It is more necessarily synchronous and thus less asynchronous, thus harder to arrange. Information may be more often lost or degraded when left to memory rather than written.

Moreover, the process triggers viscous cycles. Fewer readers mean less money for news media, resulting in more spartan bundles of content in those media. Fewer media means that those which exist are easier to control by coercive governments. Focus of limited reading on the texts of religious institutions means less focus on reading of knowledge sources within economic, political, and commercial institutions.

We know that education is a key to social and economic development, and Americans believe that the three R's are the key to education -- reading, writing and 'rithmatic. Thinking about reading and writing in the context of the plethora of knowledge systems that make modern society work helps to explain why.

A Thought About Prosecutorial Misconduct

In several recent cases important federal government prosecutions have been halted or overturned due to judicial determinations that prosecutorial misconduct had occurred. The New York Times tells of a judgment against the prosecutors in the Blackrock case (security guards charged with killings in Iraq) and the Justice Department requesting an overturn of the conviction of Senator Ted Stevens. There is also a recent decision throwing out the case against members of the Broadcom corporation,

The judicial knowledge system uses adversarial processes to seek to establish whether a defendant is guilty of criminal conduct. Prosecutorial misconduct screws up the truth seeking process. In general the process seems to work reasonably well in establishing whether someone is guilty of a crime or (alternatively) coming to a definitive statement that the criminal act can not be proven. When a case is dismissed with prejudice due to prosecutorial misconduct it is not the same as a formal decision that guilt of the defendant has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt, but simply that the government authorities have themselves misbehaved.

I suppose there is a parallel between scientific misconduct, in which the scientific knowledge system fails to establish the reliability of a scientific observation and prosecutorial misconduct. Both represent failures of knowledge systems, both damage the confidence in the systems themselves, and both leave questions of fact unsettled. Of course, other knowledge systems also fail due to human misbehavior -- the editorial systems of news organizations when reporters falsify stories, and the mistakes made by legislative organizations when lobbyists get false information used as the basis of legislation. Human institutions are fallible!

I recall the controversy over the charges of politicization of the Justice Department by the Bush administration. I wonder whether the rash of decisions of prosecutorial misconduct represent a symptom of a malaise in Justice due to the way the Department was administered by the Bush administration.