Tutu hits Nairobi
* "The Good Old Days Of Selling Democracy: arshall Plan Films Offer History Lesson In Public Relations" By Philip Kennicott (January 27, 2007) The title says it all!
* "The Plot Thickens: A New Book Promises an Intriguing Twist to the Epic Tale of 'Doctor Zhivago'" By Peter Finn (January 27, 2007) CIA doing covertly what could have been done by the State Department overtly and better, with less negative fallout.
* "Can the U.S. Rebuild Its Image?" By Lyric Wallwork Winik in Parade magazine (January 28, 2007) Profile of Karen Hughes, the Czarina of State's Public Diplomacy initiative.
Israelis and Palestinians
Shiites and Sunis
Irish Protestants and Catholics
French Christians and Moslems
Indian Hindus and Moslems
Sri Lankan Hindus and Budhists
The birth of FM made it clear that radio, far from being a fad, had limitless possibilities for reinvention. Today, radio has become such an omnipresent backdrop to our daily lives that it's taken for granted, like electricity or tap water or convenience stores......From "Radio Days", a review of the book by Dave Marsh in The New York Times, January 28, 2007:
As Hunter S. Thompson put it,"The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."At times, the reader feels that Fisher has drawn an Alamo-like line in the sand, offering a loaded choice between radio (white hat) or television (black hat). "American radio -- like the pop culture it has helped to create, like the country it speaks to -- is ever-adapting," he insists. "As it ages, radio absorbs the new, co-opts the rebellious, and reinvents itself every step of the way." Cases in point: XM and Sirius. Even Dylan now has his own weekly XM show. As his beloved medium adapts, Fisher is out there listening, making sense of the airwaves that remain such a potent part of our lives. ·
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, broadcasting experts predicted that the advent of television would kill off radio. Many of them didn’t especially want it to survive, since it could only hold back the acceptance of TV. In fact, the radio those experts knew didn’t survive. By the mid-1950s, the national networks that had dominated since the ’20s had all but evaporated, replaced by more than twice as many local stations. Television took over presenting broadcast drama and comedy, variety shows and in-depth news.Comment: Radio interests me, as perhaps the medium that is currently most potentially transformative of the lives of the poor in developing nations. Receiver technology is already affordable. Battery operated radios work even in the many areas that don't have power lines. Packaged technology for low power transmitting stations is increasingly affordable and easy to operate, and it too can be powered by generators or solar panels in areas off the electrical grid. Thus community radio is an affordable and increasingly accessible option for developing nations.
Yet radio itself survived. Radio outstrips television as a means of conveying intimacy and, precisely because it doesn’t show but can only tell, may stir the active imagination more deeply. It’s cheaper to operate a radio station, and in those years broadcasting equipment was much more mobile, making it perfect for local presentations. With recorded music (before the advent of TV, most radio programming consisted of live performance), stations found a cheap programming source that attracted enough listeners to generate its lifeblood — advertising revenue — even after TV took hold.
In “Something in the Air,” Marc Fisher takes the story from there, arguing that radio — those who programmed and performed on it, and the music they played — inspired his entire generation to come together
A little more than science-reflecting was done to the site (by the government employees). Gone first was the "Controversial research" section that included comments critical of NIDA. Next went the section on the NIDA-sponsored program that grows marijuana for research and medical purposes. The next slice of the federal editor's knife left all outside references on the cutting-room floor, replaced with links to government Web sites.Comment: I am having trouble articulating why this story bothers me so much. I think it is because it suggests a new form of government censorship, in which government employees (paid with taxpayers dollars) remove comments critical of their work from a public space -- a space which is quite appropriate for such criticism. Were there not a history of Bush administration appointees seeking describing their activities to prevent the public from having access to knowledge as "in the interest of science" I might be less suspicious of the activity here. Certainly it is permissible for an agency of the government to have staffers review material posted about the agency, and seek to correct erroneous statements, clarify postings, or rebut claims which appear unfair. However there is a dramatic and important line between public service and censorship. JAD
Read the full article by Ed Silverman in The Scientist (Volume 21 | Issue 1 | Page 43).The hardball approach (taken by greedy U.S. university tech transfer offices), however, may be prompting more companies to consider trolling for inventions (or investing in university research?) overseas, simply because some foreign universities are perceived as more willing to agree to industry terms. For instance, a university in Europe or Asia may be willing to assign ownership of the patent to the company sponsoring research, whereas a university in the United States is more likely to offer only an option to negotiate a royalty-bearing license, says Susan Butts, senior director of external science and technology programs at Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich. "There can be an enormous difference," she says, "and there were times where we've walked away from deals." (Parenthetical comments added.)
Revolution Health Group, the year-old company started by America Online co-founder Steve Case, yesterday unveiled a preview of its free health Web site and debuted a concierge-style consumer service.......The institutionalization of intermediation for the supply of health information to patients and the general public is perhaps the fundamental issue of health planning. Since Abraham Flexner almost 100 years ago recognized that the European model of medical education made sense to replace the dysfunctional anarchy in the United States, but was not ideal for China, developing nations have struggled with questions of the relative roles of paramedicals, traditional practitioners, and doctors in diagnosis, prescription, and treatment of patients. The problem has not disappeared in developed nations, although affluence may reduce the urgency of its solution.
RevolutionHealth.com joins a list of contenders seeking to become the leading online provider of health-related information. The nine-year old WebMD is by far the dominant player, with 35 million unique visitors per month and about $170 million in annual revenue......
Other competitors include HealthCentral Network of Arlington, a collection of condition-specific sites that has 7 million unique visitors per month, and Waterfront Media of New York, publisher of EverydayHealth.com, which has 5 million unique visitors per month.
Strongly condemn the Holocaust Conference sponsored by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran on December 11–12, 2006, and its attempt to falsify history;Another widely covered news story this week, as presented by The Guardian, notes:
Pay homage to the memory of the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and express our empathy for the survivors of this immense tragedy as well as all other victims of crimes against humanity across the world.
Iran's most senior dissident cleric said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's aggressive nuclear diplomacy had harmed the country, joining a chorus of criticism that has included even the hard-line leader's conservative allies.Comment: Demagoguery confronted by inconvenient fact. JAD
The comments by Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, released Monday, reflected a growing feeling among many that Ahmadinejad has concentrated too much on fiery, anti-U.S. speeches and not enough on the economy.
Montazeri, 85, is one of a few grand ayatollahs, the most senior theologians of the Shiite Muslim faith. He had been the designated successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, until he fell out with Khomeini shortly before his 1989 death after complaining about powers wielded by unelected clerics.
He said Iranians have the right to nuclear power, but questioned Ahmadinejad's dealings with the international community in obtaining it......
Prices of fruit, vegetables and food staples have skyrocketed since the U.N. Security Council imposed limited sanctions on Iran in December for defying a resolution demanding that it halt uranium enrichment, a process that can produce material to fuel nuclear reactors or provide fuel for bombs.
'Some countries don't have oil and gas. Yet, they run their country and stand on their own. We have so much oil and gas but make useless expenditures work for others and don't think of our own people's problems and the price of basic commodities go higher and higher every day,' Montazeri said.
One intriguing possibility that Erck did not rule out is a partnership with MedImmune, the Gaithersburg company that makes the nasal-spray vaccine FluMist, the only needle-free flu vaccine.
Read the full article: "Bird flu surges in 2006: WHO chief" on Yahoo!/Agence France-Presse (1/22)We often hear that Americans know little about other nations; a bigger problem is that we know too little about ourselves, our history and our national character. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, in particular, we were all born yesterday, unaware of how present policies and attitudes fit into persistent historical patterns.
Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public.Comment: Compare this book with Istanbul. My comments on Istanbul focused on the way Orhan Pamuk deals with the influence of European and Istanbul writers and artists on the way he and other Istanbullus think about their city and themselves. Igo, a historian, focuses on the way in which sociological statistics influence the way modern citizens of the United States think about their country and themselves. I note that the use of statistics and social science in one culture, and the use of art and literature for similar purposes in another culture, says something about the nature of "knowledge" in the two cultures. Here, of course, I am using "two cultures" in much the sense that C. P. Snow did in the book. JAD
Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as "the average American" and as intimate as the sexual self.
With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society--and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.
A bronze statue of a hippo stands on the campus of George Washington University. A plaque on the statue reads:GW's River Horse
Legend has it that the Potomac was once home to these wondrous beasts. George and Martha Washington are even said to have watched them cavort in the river shallows from the porch of their beloved Mount Vernon on summer evenings.
Credited with enhancing the fertility of the plantation, the Washingtons believed the hippopotamuses brought them good luck, and children on the estate often attempted to lure the creatures close enough to the shore to touch a nose for good luck.
So, too, many generations of students of The George Washington University.
Art for wisdom,
Science for joy,
Politics for beauty,
And a Hippo for hope.
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
by Ogden Nash
A partnership of international health organizations said yesterday that it will seek to reduce the global death toll from measles to less than 10 percent of its 2000 level by 2010, spurred in part by bigger-than-expected gains against the disease in the past five years.Read the World Health Organization's news release: "Global goal to reduce measles deaths in children surpassed"
The effort seeks to extend the coalition's dramatic success in cutting annual deaths from measles by more than 60 percent since 1999, easily bettering its goal of cutting mortality in half.
* Life expectancy at birth for males is 75, compared with 79 in a couple of small countries, 36 in Swaziland, 37 in Zimbabwe, 39 in Lesotho, 40 in Botswana and the Central African Republic, 41 in Côte d'Ivoire and Malawi, and 42 in Afghanistan amd Burundi.
* Eight per 1000 boys born in the United States die in their first five years, compared with 4 in Sweden, Norway, Singapore and Japan, 275 in Angola, 258 in Afghanistan, 256 in Niger, 249 in Liberia, 225 in Côte d'Ivoire, and 212 in Chad and Guinea-Bissau.
SciDev.Net has just published online a free technology transfer resource for developing country policymakers that includes, among other things, information on how to take advantage of foreign direct investment, how to help firms build their own technological capacity and what the public sector can do to support agricultural technology transfer. The resource contains peer-reviewed policy briefs, opinion articles, a collection of key documents and links as well as definitions of essential terms.
"E-mail is a slightly different matter. The law makes a distinction between intercepting e-mail in transit and obtaining stored e-mail from a service provider's servers.......These days, most e-mail is held and stored by third parties. So the government claims the authority to read someone's most intimate communications, including stored chat sessions, by serving a subpoena -- no probable cause required. A person may never even know that this has been done, as there is no legal requirement for an Internet service provider to provide notice......
"The same holds true for virtually any information held by a third party: phone company records that indicate who called you, when they called and how long the call lasted; Internet service provider records on what Web sites you visited, when and for how long; tollbooth records; security camera footage; records of emergency calls made from a car; supermarket purchase records. All that and more can be requested by the government with a search warrant, or sometimes with an administrative subpoena or other demand, frequently without judicial review."
The Blue Marble from Appolo 17The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.Read the full study from the National Academies: Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond
The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.
Half of the country's environmental satellites will stop working by 2010, which could lead to a loss of data used to study climate change, predict natural disasters, and monitor land use. NASA and NOAA should secure long-term funding to maintain existing and previously planned satellite missions and to undertake a set of 17 new missions between 2010 and 2020, says a new National Research Council reportComment: I understand that the acronym TTIA stands for Title Tells It All. JAD
"The Senior Vice President and Chief Economist requested an independent evaluation of all research activities carried out by the World Bank, both in its Development Economics Vice-Presidency and in other Bank units, between 1998 and 2005.Read The Economist's Economics focus. "What the World Bank knows" (January 11th 2007, subscription required) which reviews the evaluation."The evaluation draws on all outputs of research projects as well as World Development Reports, Policy Research Reports and flagship reports. Overall, this represents more than 4,000 journal articles, books and databases.
"The evaluation was carried out by an panel consisting of Angus Deaton (Chair), Princeton University; Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University; Abhijit Banerjee, M.I.T.; and Nora Lustig, Director of the Poverty Group at UNDP. The panel, in turn, selected thematic evaluators and asked them to review a random sample of 186 research projects. The evaluators are Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Francesco Caselli (LSE), Tim Besley (LSE), Sebastian Edwards (UCLA), Gordon Hanson (UC San Diego), Nina Pavcnik (Dartmouth College), Esther Duflo (MIT), Murray Leibbrandt and Martin Wittenberg (U of Cape Town), Nancy Birdsall (CGD), Josh Angrist (MIT), Sebastian Galiani (U de San Andrés, Argentina), Jonathan Morduch (NYU), Marianne Bertrand (U. of Chicago), Justin Lin (Beijing U.), Chris Udry (Yale), Marcel Fafchamps (Oxford), Edward Glaeser (Harvard), Michael Kremer (Harvard), Andrew Foster (Brown U.), Geoffrey Heal (Columbia U.), Peter Diamond (MIT), Antoinette Schoar (MIT) and Jan Svejnar (U. of Michigan).
"The evaluators were asked to evaluate the publications from the sample projects paying particular attention to reliability, rigor, completeness and relevance and, in addition, to give their overall assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Bank research in their area of expertise based on the sample and their general knowledge of Bank research. The sample was chosen randomly, with a bias towards more recent and ongoing projects in order to better evaluate the current direction of the Bank’s research. The sample also included 50 of the best outputs selected by the Development Research Group to ensure that full consideration was given to what researchers themselves consider to be their best research. The Panel also conducted interviews of Bank staff and management; developing country policymakers, NGOs and other users of Bank research."
The article's main thrust suggests that the new team of Americans in Iraq is composed of people who objected to the ideologically driven, stupid policies of the last four years, and is complimentary to Mr. Carney. (Comment: I don't mind ideology all that much, although I mind people implementing their ideology that differs from mine in my name, but I do mind bad planning and worse implementation. JAD)Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn't fazed by chaos. He'd been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia's civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, "was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them."
He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned. The U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), placed ideology over pragmatism, he believed. His boss, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, refused to pay for repairs needed to reopen many looted state-owned factories, even though they had employed tens of thousands of Iraqis. Carney spent his days screening workers for ties to the Baath Party.
"Planning was bad," he wrote in his diary on May 8, "but implementation is worse."
When he returned to Washington, he made little secret of his views. They were so scathing that his wife lost a government contract. He figured his days of working on Iraq were over.
* The failure of historians for a long time to recognize that the native American societies of the 18th and 19th centuries were societies created by the survivors after the population crash caused by the influx of diseases from the old world brought by the Columbian exchange. The social structures created from the remnants of earlier societies and the acquisitions from new contacts with the European societies, under pressure from the invaders and colonists provided little hint of the greatness that had been lost.
* The emergence of better history that is possible combining archaeological and anthropological knowledge with history, delving into the historical records from the Maya now being deciphered for the first time, and retrieving original sources from the archives of those records of the early contacts.
* The failure of U.S. schools and text books to provide an adequate coverage of pre-Columbian history, and the vast ignorance of the U.S. population of the history of this hemispere. Our view of native Americans should be different if we knew more about what their ancestors had achieved. We might be wiser if we understood more about the varieties of human experience, and might gain that breadth of understanding if we could add the richness of history of other continents to our knowledge of European history.
* The huge impact on the environment that the human population had in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years they had occupied the Western Hemisphere. They possessed at least one powerful technology -- fire. Even pulling up plants seen as weedy species, planting and protecting plants that they valued, hunting and controlling competing species, pre-Columbian Americans could and almost surely did greatly modify the the ecology of the North and South American continents.
* While we are coming to understand the impact of European immigrants and technology on the American environment, we probably have underestimated the impact of the crash of the native American population on the environment. Removing 90 or 95 percent of a human population of say 100 million, who had developed extensive technologies and infrastructure must have had a major impact on the environment.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is attempting to fire biologist Charles (Rex) Wahl, charging he shared sensitive information with environmental groups and other government agencies in a deliberate attempt to undermine Reclamation projects......I don't know enough about the case to comment, but it doesn't seem to be an offense for a scientific officer in one government agency to communicate with officers of other agencies by email without prior permission from his agency. The government would grind to a halt were that standard to be imposed and inforced!
At issue are Emails Wahl sent while an Environmental Specialist in Reclamation's Yuma, Arizona office. His supervisors discovered the messages -- addressed to individuals at the Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the nonprofit group Environmental Defense -- on Wahl's computer after he transferred from Yuma to Albuquerque last May........
According to Paula Dinerstein, an attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which is representing Wahl, he is protected by provisions of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Solid Waste Disposal Act. "In some cases he was disclosing what he saw as a violation of a regulation or law, or a danger to public health or safety," she said. "Those are protected disclosures."......
the hostile environment Wahl described sounded familiar to Kirk Lashmett, a biologist who retired from the Bureau of Reclamation's Western Colorado office last spring. [Wahl's] "is not an isolated case," Lashmett told The Scientist. After more than 30 years with Reclamation, Lashmett claimed he was forced into early retirement when his supervisors cited him for misconduct. He contends a bizarre misconduct claim -- that he let his dog defecate in the office (a charge he denies) -- was invented as retaliation for speaking out about environmental negligence. "Environmental compliance is a joke," he said. "If you're not willing to turn your cheek and look the other way, they'll go after you."
* People living at the subsistence level fear loss of income that could drop them below subsistence; the social safety net legislation was initiated to protect such people. As poverty levels decline, there is less need to have methods to assure basic human needs are met when incomes are reduced.
* Typically, higher rates of return require one to assume higher risks. It people have the resources to allow them to be less risk adverse, they may be able to invest time, effort and money in activities with higher expected returns even if they also have higher risk. A trend of people making higher risk, higher average return investments would appear to be very positive for the economic growth of a society, and consistant with a correlation between economic growth and income volatility (as a greater portion of the riskier investments fail).
In this vital new study, Andrew Abbott presents a fresh and daring analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. Chaos of Disciplines reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles. New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts.Here is a Review by William G. Tierney
Chaos of Disciplines uses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines, and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences. Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method, then, in fields ranging from history, sociology, and literature, are to the contrary, radically similar; much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own distinctions.
Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder can actually make systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder—or suffer guilt over the mess they can't avoid. No longer!Read a review of the book in The Economist.
With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess,A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahmson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones.
Applying this idea on scales both large (government, society) and small (desktops, garages), A Perfect Mess uncovers all the ways messiness can trump neatness, and will help you assess the right amount of disorder for any system. Whether it's your company's management plan or your hallway closet that bedevils you, this book will show you why to say yes to mess.
