Biology's Big Bang

Two pieces on the same topic from The Economist of June 14, 2007.

• "The RNA revolution: Biology's Big Bang"

What physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st—and RNA will be a vital part of it

• "RNA: Really New Advances"

  Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance

The Economist suggests that molecular biology is undergoing a paradigm shift, especially since biologists have discovered over the past few years that RNA plays a much more extensive and important role in cells than had been previously understood, and that a lot of DNA codes for RNA that is not used in producing proteins but rather plays roles in the modification of gene activity and metabolism. Further, it suggests that the economic and social impact of advances in biology in the 21st century will be comparable to that in the 20th century from advances in physics (electification, radio communication, electronics, telephony, internal combustion engines, atomic energy, etc.).

It occurs to me how important the development of computers and computer control is in the new biology. Gene sequencers would not be practical were they not computer controlled. So too, the techniques for gene sequencing depend heavily of massive computing power to discover how the tens of thousands of sequenced pieces of the genes fit together to form chromosomes. We now know there are more than 20,000 protein encoding genes in man, and comparable numbers in other species. There appear to be even more RNA molecules that are coded in the DNA. Just keeping track of 50,000 coding units in the DNA requires computers. Experiments to screen the activity of the many alleles of each gene in thousand of subjects to implicate genetic causes of disease and behavior also is only possible due to computer power.

Comparably, brain scanning seems to be opening extremely important windows on cognition, but tomography too is computation intensive.

Bio-informatics may be among the most important technological bases of the newly evolving paradigms in biology!

"What Does Africa Need Most: Technology or Aid?"

Read the full article in The New York Times, June 17, 2007.

Jason Pontin, after describing the poverty he saw near his lodge in Arusha, Tanzania writes:

I attended the Technology, Education and Design Global 2007 conference, in the modern Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge. The contrast between the two experiences troubled me.

TED conferences, mostly held in Monterey, Calif., are invitation-only affairs, are attended by the aristocracy of Silicon Valley and are known for their adventurousness in drawing together wildly disparate trends in technology, business and the arts.

On this occasion, Bono, the Irish rock star and champion of African causes, had persuaded the conference’s organizer, Chris Anderson, to invite the usual crowd, as well as African entrepreneurs, activists, health care professionals and artists to this tropical, leafy region midway between the Serengeti Plain and Mount Kilimanjaro.

Pontin goes on in the article to describe the success of Alieu Conteh in bringing mobile phones to the Congo in spite of the difficulties of working in that country. The fundamental issue Pontin identifies in this statement:

The question that the conference was really exploring was this: How can we make every African family richer?

At TED Global 2007, I witnessed one small skirmish in a larger ideological conflict between those who believe that Africa needs more and better international aid, and those who think entrepreneurialism and technology will lift the continent out of poverty and thus reduce its miseries.

Africa needs better governance, since poor policies, corruption and incompetent administration too often cripple development efforts. It needs an end to wars that often set back decades of progress. It needs a sound physical environment, since desertification, climate change, degradation of soils, pollution, and other environmental problems will halt and reverse development efforts. It needs fair and open access to international markets for the products it can produce, free from trade barriers, markets in which competitors from rich countries are not subsidized by their governments.

If the proper conditions are met, the private sector can reasonably be expected to lead in development. In those same conditions, experience has shown the foreign development assistance also works, especially in areas in which market forces do not or can not do what we believe to be necessary -- to educate the children, to provide public health services, etc.

Technological improvement will be important for development. It can be a motor for economic growth, improving the productivity with which resources are used; technological innovation is certainly necessary to keep an economy efficient as relative factor costs change with development. Sometimes new technologies will solve ancient problems, such as through the control of tropical diseases. Sometimes they will allow African nations to leapfrog development steps taken by European and North American countries in their historical development.

The Arts as Conveyers of Knowledge

• Parables.
• Sagas, that make information memorable using verse and drama.
• The Cimabue and Giotto paintings in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi that made religious instruction available to the churchgoer as art. Indeed, the stream of Renaissance art that instructed viewers in religion, politics, and classics.
• Essays, that when well written rise to the level of literature, while delving into and conveying information and analysis.
• Novels may entertain, thrill, and have pure aesthetic value, but they can also inform. Indeed, literature can convey knowledge tacitly, helping us to understand people and society in ways not possible through virtual observation.
• So too, film and theater may convey information not only by sugar coating it in entertainment, but also be linking it to the emotions of author, director, actors and audience in ways that make it indelible, and by conveying tacit knowledge that can not be expressed nor understood as well via prose.
• Opera and the musical theater, conveying all the aspects of drama with music and thereby affecting more directly the emotions as well as the intellect. Indeed, music conveys musical ideas as the visual arts convey ideas from the visual arts in ways that can not be done via the spoken or written word.

This blog has focused on scientific and technological knowledge, and more broadly on other knowledge systems such as the bureaucratic, legislative, judiciary, and knowledge systems of other social and economic institutions. The arts too would seem to institutionalize their own knowledge systems, not only with the internal knowledge related to the making of art, but as a medium for conveying information of other kinds.

Indeed, as we try to understand people and culture it is often better to go to the arts than to the sciences.

Thoughts Occasioned Hearing an Interview with Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. He is concerned that the Internet is getting people to attend to amateur writers of blogs, wikis and other do-it-yourself media, and undermining the established audience for professional writers, musicians, and experts. He writes:

Instead of developing technology, I believe that our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur. We need to reform rather than revolutionize an information and entertainment economy that, over the last two hundred years, has reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world. Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media—with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters, and actors—can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril. So let’s not go down in history as that infamous generation who, intoxicated by the ideal of democratization, killed professional mainstream media.

There are quite negative reviews and analyses of this book by Lawrance Lessig (on his blog) and Dan Gillmor (on the Center for Citizen Media blog). Both these guys are more expert and thoughtful than I am, but I did want to comment as well.

Certainly the Internet is changing the world. Some of the changes are not good. Independent book stores and record shops are closing, unable to survive in a world in which so many books and so much music is obtained online. Newspapers are losing circulation, and deciding often to cut back on their newsrooms as a response to that loss.

Chris Anderson's The Long Tail makes the point that people are reading more from less popular books and listening more to less popular music as a result of being able to find the products on the well stocked shelves of the Internet (when they were not on the modest shelves of the book stores and record shops). The good side of that story is that many meritorious works are getting an audience that would have otherwise gone to less meritorious works from pop culture. The bad side is that there is less of a market for the stars.

Baumol and Bowen identified as "the cost disease" the fact that some services can not be made more efficient. It takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to play a symphony well as it did 100 or 200 years ago; it takes a team as long to play a baseball game now as it did 100 years ago, and the team is of the same size. The productivity of live performances could not improve, and thus as technological change improves the efficiency of other activities, live performances become relatively more expensive.

On the other hand Sherwin Rosen in "The Economics of Superstars" pointed out that the mass media made recorded or broadcast services cheaper. The cost of a symphony orchestra recording session could be amortized over the sale of a million CDs, and a baseball game could be broadcast to a million TV viewers instead of the audience who would attend a game in person. As a result, the superstar could demand very high fees for performing, while the average performer finds few venues in which to perform (and winds up in another profession).

Of course, the audience has only so much attention. People reading an old classic will not be reading the new best seller; listening to a recording from La Scala keeps one out of the local opera house; watching the game on TV is not really compatible with attending the local minor league game. So the fame and wealth of the media superstar comes at the expense of the audience for the run-of-the-mill performer.

I just went through Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and was reminded how much of leisure time in the past was taken up with games and the arts. I remember when kids used to go play in the streets or the school playgrounds after school, but they seem to stay indoors these days tied to the media. In the middle class in the 19th century, everyone had a parlor act -- singing, playing an instrument, reciting poetry, or even a dramatic reading. Of course the quality of the performance was not what we expect of professionals on TV, but people actually performed. The media-based star system's growth was as marked by the decline of general performance skills as the growth of the automobile industry was marked by the decline of the horse and buggy industry.

I personally am glad to see the Internet creating a world in which people again entertain and inform small groups of their friends and peers with their own amateur writing and performing. If that means that the TV stars will have less audience and less wealth, I can live with that.

Of course, the leisure class was pretty small in Jane Austen's day. For every upper class twit enjoying the season at Bath in 1800, there were a lot of people sweating their short lives out in the mines or mills. Technological progress, including the development of ICT that brought us the media, has increased productivity and people have used that increased productivity not only to buy more goods but to have more leisure, and thus more time to attend to reading and writing, studying, playing and watching others play, making and listening to music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the 19th century:

• If you do not use the tools, they use you.
• Things are in the saddle / and ride mankind.

The concept is similar to that in Langdon Winner's book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. But a society need not move thoughtlessly in response to technological change. As Noel Perrin has shown in his book, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, it is possible with the right leadership for a society to choose the way to use a technology, or even to choose not to use a technology. I think Keen is right in his assertion that innovations in the information infrastructure may have unintended negative consequences, and that we as a society would be well advised to act to assure that expertise survives and prospers, that expert opinion is heard and is influential.

My reading of history, suggests that as information technologies proliferate, they do not fully replace one another. The telephone did not replace the telegraph for a very long time, and radio survived the introduction of television. Books continue to be important in our lives.

Moreover, people are using the increase in labor productivity to allow much more education, and there are many more experts now than in the past. Moreover, information and communications technology advances are increasing the efficiency of experts in information acquisition, analysis and dissemination of their intellectual products. It may be that the unregulated effect of the Internet will not be as destructive to expertise as Keen fears.

Note also that we should not be too complacent about the values of cultural aspects of the 20th century that grew up under the information infrastructure of that time. The star system kept a lot of creative people from reaching any audience as we watched the most commercially successful. (Think of Van Gogh or Vermeer, artists who were completely missed by almost the entire audience in earlier decades.) Mass media often dumbed down content to a level that maximized audience rather than beneficial impact.

And of course, major aspects of 20th century culture were massive lack of education in the world, undue influence of propaganda, and commercialization and commodification of culture. I would not be displeased to see the Internet kill some of these aspects of our culture allowing a more rational and quality oriented aspects of culture to grow in their place.

OECD Journal on Development: Development Co-operation Report 2006

Development donors will have to increase funding for aid programs faster than any other public expenditure in order to fulfill their commitments to increase aid to $130 billion and double aid to Africa by 2010,. In order to meet those commitments, aid funding, recently rising by 5% per year, would have to rise by 11% every year from 2008 to 2010.

The report reviews aid volumes, noting which donors give the most–the US by absolute amount, Sweden and Norway as a percentage of their gross national incomes–and which countries get the most: Iraq at $12.9 billion annually in 2004-05 and Nigeria at $3.2 billion, both boosted by exceptional debt relief.

Click here to download the report (free of charge) in PDF format.

“Key figures 2007 on Science, Technology and Innovation”

This is a new report from the European Union, stating that private sector investment in R&D is too low.

R&D intensity (R&D expenditure as % of GDP) in Europe has stagnated since the mid-nineties, while major competitors such as Japan, China or South Korea have been able to increase substantially their R&D effort, shaping a world where knowledge is more evenly distributed than ever before. Moreover, the R&D investment deficit against the US has remained constant over recent years. In particular, the low level of business R&D in the EU remains worrying. Key Figures 2007 shows that differences in the industrial structure of the EU compared to countries such as the US are the main cause for this low level of business R&D, with the EU having a smaller high-tech industrial sector, which usually has much higher levels of R&D spending. The new actions taken in Europe since 2005 in the context of the revised Lisbon Strategy need to be implemented if Europe is to successfully face this challenge.

Frontline: Hot Politics

PBS' Frontline last night broadcast a program on the politics behind U.S. (lack of effective) policy on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. You can watch the full program online, and the website provides supporting information.

Note especially this assertion:

Campaigning for president, Texas Governor George W. Bush pledges to cap carbon dioxide fumes and require power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions "within a reasonable period of time."

The Bush administration quickly broke the campaign pledge, and still, seven years later is blocking serious caps to carbon dioxide emissions.

The program suggests the political motivation and processes behind the Bush administration's efforts to smear scientific results that ran counter to its policy preferences with the term "junk science", and linked the use of the term with respect to global warming with slightly earlier efforts to discredit scientific results about the dangers of smoking made by the cigarette industry.

Is Myers the Right Person

From Utter Wonder: The Idle Thoughts of C. Monk
"Subject #5: Animal, vegetable, or Bush crony?"

In 2005, when Julie Myers was nominated to head the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, some questioned her qualifications for the job. At that time 36 years old, Ms. Myers had little immigration or customs experience. Eventually she assumed the job following a recess appointment by President George W. Bush on January 4, 2006.

According to Wikipedia:

Myers was formerly the Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at the Department of Commerce. In that capacity, she oversaw 170 employees and a $25 million budget. She is also the niece of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Richard Myers, and is the wife of John F. Wood, the current U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri and the former chief of staff for the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Now that the Congress is having troubles compromising on an acceptable immigration bill, and the Bush administration is having difficulties getting Republican legislators to support the administration's position on the legislation, I wonder whether a more experienced, respected and expert leader for the Customs and Immigration Enforcement Agency would have done better.

Senate Leaders Agree to Revive Immigration Bill - New York Times

Senate Leaders Agree to Revive Immigration Bill - New York Times:

"Senate Democratic and Republican leaders announced on Thursday that they had agreed on a way to revive a comprehensive immigration bill that was pulled off the Senate floor seven days ago."

Comment: Good news! Now lets hope that they can pass the bill this time. Certainly a compromise is going to be needed, and let us also hope that the Congress can pass a bill that will substantially improve the situation. We need:
- to regularize the status of the illegal immigrants who stay in the United States,
- to provide means to allow the long term and short term immigration needed for full operation of our economy, and
- to make the borders less permeable against terrorists and other unwanted and illegal immigrants and visitors. JAD

"Taking Montgomery County’s Technology Community to the Next Level"

This report, focusing on a high technology cluster in the United States, notes that "according to the Small Business Administration, four out of five new businesses fail within the first five years. However, the National Business Incubator Association estimates that 80 percent of firms cultivated in an incubator continue to operate after the same time period has elapsed." It also states that in the United States, "the public sector cost per direct job created by investments in incubation is low, ranging from roughly $3,000 to $12,000 per job. Moreover, approximately 84 percent of incubated firms tend to locate locally upon graduation from an incubator."

Sage Policy Group, Ltd., January 2005. (PDF, 62 pages.)

Culture, Control, Information, the Intangible

I have been reading Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown. The book describes the efforts of native or indigenous cultures to control that which UNESCO calls intangible cultural heritage.

The book illustrates in many ways that American concerns for the free flow of information, and our belief that sharing information brings economic and technological progress are not shared in many cultures. There are even differences among OECD countries in this respect, but many indigenous groups are concerned that their heritage is being appropriated without proper recompense, or that inappropriate use of their cultural heritage by outsiders is a form of pollution. Indeed he tells a story of an early anthropologist who would physically shove his way into secret rituals in the U.S. Southwest, where the tribal peoples were afraid to physically eject him for fear of reprisals, and record the ceremonies; the tribe is seeking the return of all those records.

As I think about it, it seems to me that our culture often institutionalizes control over the intangible via rights, especially property rights. Ours is also a culture that embodies those rights in laws, and specifically intellectual property rights laws. Thus we have trade secrets law, copyright law, trademark law, and patent law, plant breeders law, etc. together forming a complex web of intellectual property rights (IPR) law. As science and technology bring new intangibles under human control, in order to stimulate investment in those technologies, we change the IPR law. Thus we patent software and genes now, when we did not do so in the past. We pass laws to control the use of symbols, such as governmental flags. We even have international treaties in this area, including the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

However, American culture does not invariably resort to laws to protect information and the intangible. We do not criminalize plagiarism in the schools. Churches ordain ministers, thereby controlling the rights to perform specified rituals. Social sanctions are applied to women who show up a posh parties in the gowns that other's had planned to wear.

Indigenous cultures are, I think not nearly so legalistic as ours. In any case, the indigenous culture finds its institutions for the control of what we term to be intellectual property are sometimes in conflict with the institutions of the dominant societies in which they live. As indigenous groups have been more fully empowered, they have sought (and have found allies in seeking) to institutionalize protections i the larger society for some forms of information/expression. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States all have laws and/or policies that resulted from such efforts.

However, an increasingly globalized economy creates international threats to the cultural intangibles of indigenous peoples, threats that can not be met by laws within single nations. Thus we have the growth of the UNESCO conventions mentioned above.

This blog focuses on knowledge and understanding, and necessarily on the information used to communicate that knowledge and understanding, on analysis to deepen understanding of the meaning of information, and on the ways that information is embodied in things and institutions. This posting seems relevant to those purposes because Brown's book raises fundamental questions about how we should embody intangibles in institutions, and more precisely, how we should handle the clash of cultures occasioned by the differences in the ways they institutionalize control of intangibles.

Diabetes News - American Diabetes Association

Diabetes News - American Diabetes Association:

"Making good on a key campaign promise and reigniting a longstanding ethical controversy, the House approved legislation Thursday to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research in the search for cures to diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and juvenile diabetes.

The bill now goes to the White House, and President Bush promised to veto it."

Comment: Is it only a coincidence that a misleading story suggesting that fully potent stem cells would soon be produced from skin cells was released to the media just before the vote? Every year that we delay research exploiting the potential of embryonic stem cells is another year that people will suffer and die needlessly from medical conditions we will eventually learn to prevent or treat as a result of stem cell research. JAD

Village Computer Command and Control

I have been thinking someone should develop an appropriate command and control system technology for village level use in developing nations.

Remember the invasion of Iraq? American forces blitzed into the country with detailed maps and information on laptop computers in every vehicle. There was real time information on battlefield conditions as a result of remote sensing, and it was sent to every vehicle. Geographic information systems linked the remote sensing data to the maps and background information. Using GPS, the location of every vehicle was known at all times. Communications among coalition units via radio was constant. Less obvious, there was detailed information at every step of the logistics chain.

It seems to me that a comparable system could be made available at low cost for use by civil authorities in developing nations. Certainly there are low cost computers and low cost GIS software. Micro-aircraft can be flown by ground operators with remote sensing equipment. Cell phones can provide cheap communication networks. There are now lots of ground sensors that could be established in networks that could uplink to central information systems.

An article titled "The trees have eyes" in the June 7th edition of The Economist describes the application of systems of this type for protection of endangered species from poaching in game parks in the developing world.

It seems to me that such a system could be developed now for deployment in emergency situations, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes and/or hurricanes. Emergency relief requires that rapid surveillance of the situation, establishment of replacement communications, and management of the complex logistics to deliver the relief.

Similarly, such systems could be moved from village to village for national campaigns. There are many public health applications one might consider -- managing vector control campaigns, immunization campaigns, even health education campaigns. I could imagine an agriculture extension service using such a system for campaigns dealing with crop and animal diseases and pests, or traveling from village to village alerting farmers to soil conditions and fertilization techniques linked to soil conditions.

Food security teams could use the technology in conditions of drought or harvest failure to identify needs for food support and management of logistics at the local area.

The prices for all the technological pieces for such systems are going to continue to decrease, and development of the pilot systems and applications would enable national gatekeepers to begin to find new and better applications for VCCCs as they became economically feasible.

Making Media More Meritricious

Two articles from today's Washington Post caught my attention:

"Blair Likens News Media to 'Feral Beast': British Leader Says Competition Has Pushed Press to Focus on the Sensational"

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that the news media, driven by increasing competition and pressure from fast-changing technology, have largely abandoned impartial reporting in favor of sensation, shock and controversy, which he said demoralizes public servants and badly serves the public.

"Dan Rather Takes On Network News With His Tart Remark"

Rather sparked the controversy during a radio appearance Monday morning when he said CBS executives have attempted over the past year to lure viewers to the "CBS Evening News" -- which has plummeted in the ratings -- by "dumbing it down and tarting it up.".....

Rather -- who anchored CBS's evening newscast for nearly a quarter-century -- thinks the failure of the "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric" isn't really Couric's fault but Moonves's. The CBS chief decided that to get younger viewers to watch the news, it has to be more fun, more upbeat, more entertaining. In other words: The news had to stop being the news.

Comment: I watched the CBS Evening News for a while when Katie Couric took over, but switched to ABC News, and now I watch the International Edition of BBC News on PBS. I also find that the Washington Post, my daily newspaper, does not seem to do as good a job covering the news as it once did (in the days of Watergate, for example).

It is not that the news has been "dumbed down". People can use as much intelligence on silly stories as on important ones. It is that the media panders to the audience, presenting that which will attract the largest numbers (or, more accurately, the most profitable audience) rather than that which will best inform the audience.

Fortunately, I am not as dependent on newspapers and network news as once I was. TV does give me German, French and other international stations via cable, which provides alternative viewpoints. I get a number of magazines including The Economist and The Week. And of course, the Internet provides a wealth of access to news and views. Still, it is too bad that the major media don't do a better job of covering that which is important to know! JAD

According to Merriam-Webster:

mer·e·tri·cious
Pronunciation: "mer-&-'tri-sh&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin meretricius, from meretric-, meretrix prostitute, from merEre to earn -- more at MERIT
1 : of or relating to a prostitute : having the nature of prostitution
2 a : tawdrily and falsely attractive b : superficially significant : PRETENTIOUS
synonym see GAUDY

Felice Frankel Fuels Science with Art

A gel-like structure
Felice Frankel
via The New York Times

Read the full article titled "She Calls It ‘Phenomena.’ Everyone Else Calls It Art." by CORNELIA DEAN in The New York Times of June 12, 2007. The photos alone are worth the look.

The article gives tribute to a scientific illustrator -- one who not only helps the viewer to visualize scientific information, but makes images that are interesting and often beautiful in the process.

For some reason, many people seem to feel that scientific illustration can not be art. Do they feel that the religious art of da Vinci, Michelangelo or Rafael is not art because the artist was painting a subject specified in a commission for the purposes of the commissioner? Do they feel that Durer's Rhino (below) is not art because it was dealing with a subject from natural history? That conceptual, pop and mimimalist art are not art because they appeal primarily to the intellect rather than the emotions? Because they are not (necessarily) pretty. Of course, some scientific illustration is not good art, but then some paintings sold in galleries are not good art either.

I find it interesting that some scientists think in images. The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz is famously supposed to have deduced the ring structure of benzene after visualizing the Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Einstein is supposed to have come understand relativity making mental Gedanken experiments, visualizing what it would be like to ride along a light beam. Other's no doubt think in other ways, but it seems obvious that often "a picture is worth a thousand words".

On the other hand, I was listening to a discussion of brain imaging the other day, and the speaker mentioned that there is research that indicates that pictures make people overestimate what they know. As all lawyer's know, eye witnesses can be quite fallible, not only not observing accurately, but not recognizing the inaccuracies.

So how do you present information so as to both make it intelligible and to convey to the reader/viewer/listener the limitations of the information? I hope that our increasing availability of multimedia, plus the ability to build interactivity into the multimedia will allow us to eventually do a better job!

Albrecht Durer: Rhinoceros

Kenneth Kraemer Retirement Announcement

After 40 years of outstanding service to UC Irvine, Professor Kenneth Kraemer will be retiring this June. In addition to being Director of the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) and of the Personal Computing Industry Center (PCIC), he is a full Professor of Information Technology for Management at the Paul Merage School of Business of the University of California, Irvine.

Ken is the author of 16 books, including recently published titles such as Global E-Commerce: Impacts of National Environment and Policy and Asia’s Computer Challenge: Threat of Opportunity for the U.S. and the World. He has written more than 165 articles, many on the computer industry and the Asia –Pacific region, that have been published in journals such as Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Information Systems Research, The Information Society, Public Administration Review, Telecommunications Policy, and Policy Analysis. His scholarship has gained him international recognition in the field of the management of information systems.

I first met Ken 38 years ago when I entered the doctoral program at what was then the Graduate School of Administration, and have been fortunate enough to interact and correspond with him periodically over the years. He is a real intellectual leader, helping huge numbers of people to understand the role of information and communications technologies in the world-- many of whom will never recognize their debt to him.

I wish him good luck, health and happiness in his retirement.

Volunteer or Donate Now to One Vote '08

Bono and the Pope

U2 lead singer and humanitarian activist Bono has launched a $30 million effort to turn global poverty into a 2008 campaign issue. One Vote '08 held its kickoff event in Washington yesterday.

One Vote '08 has five achievable goals:

1 Save 15,000 lives a day by fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, three of the world's most devastating diseases.
2 Prevent 5.4 million young children from dying each year from poverty-related illnesses and 400,000 women from dying in childbirth each year.
3 Provide free access to primary education for 77 million out-of-school children with a special emphasis on girls.
4 Improve the living conditions of vulnerable populations by, for example, providing access to clean water for 450 million people and basic sanitation to more than 700 million people.
5 Reduce by half the number of people in the world who suffer from hunger, resulting in 300 million "fewer" hungry people each year.

Please volunteer or donate to this worthy cause, whatever your political party.

Go to the One Vote '08 website.

Source: The Economist

I had thought until seeing this table that the Bush administration's delay of an appropriate response to global warming was its worst blunder, even outweighing the disastrous war in Iraq and the feeble economic policy. However, weakening the treaty system for arms control with the Russian Federation (which is currently limited to 1,700-2,200 nuclear warheads) may be even worse, given the degree to which Bush administration policies have both strengthened and angered Russia.

Map of Privacy Quality Protection

Source: Privacy International

What you think depends on who you are!

Read "The think-tanks that miss the target," Charlemagne, The Economist, June 7, 2007.

This is an interesting comment on the relationship between the sources of financing and the quality of thinking in Think Tanks:

Too many Brussels think-tanks accept large chunks of their funding from EU institutions and national governments. Others depend on big corporate sponsors, so that the lines between research and lobbying become queasily blurred. Both forms of dependence are worsened by competition for the same pool of what Brussels considers star speakers: European commissioners, top officials and a few senior members of the European Parliament. Nobody seems able to change the default formula for Brussels policy seminars: good coffee and croissants, dull speeches and a brief exchange of conventional wisdom. The painful comparison is with Washington, DC, where the best think-tanks refuse public money, compete to set the agenda with provocative ideas, and enjoy extraordinary access to administration and Congress alike.