WHY WE SHOULD NOT SHARE KNOWLEDGE

This is a nice little paper from an author in Singapore (Thanks to Julianne Gilmore for telling me about it.

“Knowledge and Tragedy: or why we shouldn’t share knowledge”
“First, it’s not enough to simply deliver the knowledge, important though that is. The key is whether knowledge is, or can be, acted upon……Second, we don’t have to have perfect knowledge management, nor would we particularly enjoy it. In a competitive world, we simply have to be better at managing knowledge asymmetries than our current competitors are……Finally, we need to recognise that the corporate plot occupies only a part of most people’s lives. Knowledge sharing and knowledge secrecy also operate in our personal trajectories through life. By Patrick Lambe, www.straitsknowledge.com, 2003.

I think it relates to a posting a few days ago about the red tape involved in registering businesses in poor countries. Governments in these countries ask for more information than they can use, than the need, and than is healthy for their economies.

There is a dictum in medical screening: “don’t ask for information that you can’t use.” One could add other dicta:
· Don’t ask questions to which you don’t want to hear the answers;
· Don’t ask for information you can’t afford to use;
· Don’t ask for information your respondent can’t afford to supply;
· Don’t ask for information that is more expensive to generate and use, than it is beneficial to use.

THE ARMS TRADE

Shattered Lives: The Case for International Arms Control
“An average of US$22bn a year is spent on arms by countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America – a sum that would otherwise enable those same countries to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals of achieving universal primary education (estimated at $10bn a year) as well as targets for reducing infant and maternal mortality (estimated at $12bn a year).” Control Arms website, 2003. Control Arms is a campaign jointly run by Amnesty International, IANSA and Oxfam. The entire document is 3.2MB in PDF, but it can be downloaded by sections.

DIGITAL MOVIES

“Digital Projection of Films Is Coming. Now, Who Pays?”
While the United States has some 35,000 projection booths in movie theaters, only 80 cinemas use digital projectors; throughout the world, fewer than 200 cinemas in some two dozen countries are using digital projectors. It is reported that viewers prefer the digital projections as compared to traditional films. The movie distributors prefer the digital technology for a couple of reasons. Sending films digitally would save making film copies that can cost $1,200 each. It would also allow encryption that would cut down on pirating of films. In theory theaters would benefit, since the digital projection would not require projectionists, and timing and sequence of programs could be automated and made more accurate. However, digital projectors cost US$150,000 compared with US$30,000 for traditional theater quality projectors. Moreover, there are competing technologies, and universal standards apparently have not yet emerged.
By ERIC TAUB, New York Times, October 13, 2003. (HTML, 2 pages.)

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES OVER-REGULATE

It turns out that in poor countries it is almost impossibly difficult to get through the red tape required to start a formal business.

Doing Business in 2004: Understanding Regulation
This is the first in a series of annual reports presenting new quantitative indicators on the performance of business regulations which can be compared across more than 130 countries, and over time. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where, and why. The overview of the report and its table of contents are available online, while the whole report is available in hard copy for a fee. The report was prepared by a team led by Simeon Djankov, the World Bank, 2003. (PDF, 20 pages)

An article, “Poverty's chains,” based on the World Bank report is in the current Economist magazine.

E-LEARNING BLOGS

eLearnSpace is a website intended for users, managers, developers, and facilitators of elearning. Acccording to its homepage, "many resources exist for elearning, yet a model of how the pieces fit together is often missing. elearnspace has been organized to present a whole picture view of elearning." The site navigation is based on a graphic displayed on its homepage. The site is maintained by George Siemens, an instructor at Red River College in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

One page on the site links to a large number of weblogs dealing with learning and technology.

Siemens blog (elearnspace blog) is found here.

SKYPE – FREE LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE

Skype has released a preliminary version of software that allows voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony via a peer-to-peer network. The company was created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, two of the creators of KaZaA (the most used music file sharing software at the moment). Zennstrom is quoted as saying this is "a real opportunity to do something that is disruptive in a very positive way." The company reports on its website today, "1,258,967 downloads and counting". The software in now available in Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Portuguese and Swedish. An article on the innovation is published in the New York Times By NICHOLAS THOMPSON, October 12, 2003.

OUTSOURCING

This is from a recent report by the Asian Technology Information Program:

“The Outsourcing Institute estimates that the world outsourcing spending in IT is set to increase from US$56 billion in the year 2000 to US$100 billion in the year 2005. Another area that has received attention in recent years is the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The world BPO market in the year 2002 was worth US$110 billion, according to Gartner Inc. The Aberdeen Group predicts that it will reach US$248 billion in the year 2005.”

While these figures do not represent outsourcing to firms in developing nations, they suggest a large business opportunity for such firms.

INCREASING S&T FUNDING IN AFRICA

This entry in this blog is for my colleague, Akin Adubifa. It addresses his question, of what funding mechanisms can be found to increase funding for science and technology in Africa.

The first question is whether S&T funding should be increased, and if so whose funding for what kind of science and technology.

There is a saying about “throwing good money after bad”. Where S&T funding is not being used well, and where the results of S&T efforts do get applied to achieve the purposes for which the funds were given, adding funds does not make sense. This is true for governments, the private sector and donors. In a lot of African contexts, adding funding for S&T would be throwing good money after bad. Thus one good way to increase funding for S&T in Africa would be to improve the efficiency with which such funds are used, and to improve the utilization of results of the S&T activities for social and economic development. Situations like that in South Africa, in which a government will not move forward with anti-retroviral therapies against AIDS certainly do not encourage the private sector to invest in the development of such therapies for the African market.

There are basically three sources of funding for S&T activities:
· Government
· Philanthropy
· Business
In theory government and philanthropic funding are appropriate to and required for public goods, while business funds S&T as part of its profit making activities.

I would note other, or mixed forms of financing. Of course there can be direct partnerships, as when government and industry jointly fund S&T efforts. Tax financing is said to take place when the government grants exemptions from taxes in return for S&T activities by the private sector. Governments can also use their purchase power, for example subsidizing the sales of medicines so that the firm that did the R&D to develop the medicine can recoup its investment via increased sales of its product.

I think the possibility of donors agreeing to build markets in Africa for successful innovations helping to alleviate poverty is very interesting. If governments and donors would agree to support large scale public health programs where new technologies become available to fight those diseases, companies might well find it much more attractive to fund the development of new pharmaceuticals.

Similarly, developed nations could stimulate their firms to do more R&D to benefit Africa by introducing policies such as simplified reviews such as are used for orphan drugs, or by tax financing – giving tax breaks for R&D with strong humanitarian applications. In some sense such funding is easier to support politically than is direct foreign aid.

Almost all funding of R&D in and for Africa is in the public sector. In part this is because of the nature of African economies, that are heavy on agriculture and services. The desired products of S&T are those to improved agricultural and public health technologies; these are public goods and generally can not be sustainably supported by the private sector.

To the degree that people in government, civil society and business do not recognize the value of S&T, public education is an important vehicle for increasing such funding. Similarly, to the degree that institutions are inefficient, institution building is important. Thus building venture capital institutions in the United States has been important in increasing funding for innovative technological development.

There may be ways to increase private spending on S&T. I note that there is now a lot of R&D funding in the private sector going into India and China. The Internet makes it possible, even desirable for multinationals to outsource this work. But India and China have gotten this funding because they built the human and institutional resources first. It may be possible for Africa to attract such interest, especially South Africa with its more advanced S&T capacity.


Are there ways to encourage more government spending on R&D other than simple persuasion? Policy dialog or challenge grants from international donors might work.

I think more has to be done regionally, as opposed to within specific countries. Thus the European Union is now considering creation of a European institution to support fundamental research somewhat similar in concept to the U.S. National Science Foundation but serving the continental science community. The CGIAR is a pioneer of such regional institutions, but many donors are afraid of following its example in creating a long term obligation to support scientific institutions in developing nations. Many other examples of regional scientific organizations, such as those serving the nations of Central America and Panama have had great difficulty retaining the financial support of the countries served. Moreover, the big donors have not developed policies that promote regional scientific and technological efforts. Perhaps NEPAD could break through this policy barrier, and create at least a few new regional centers in Africa.

I don't know how much has been done with the private sector as a donor. Firms emphasize in kind donations. But in kind donations of staff time, equipment, equipment use, etc. might make cash donations by funders of core activities look much better.

And I think perhaps more could be done with new arrangements for the foundation community. One of the key problems has been transaction costs. Foundations in the past have had to spend a lot of money to run a project in Africa, in terms of development, monitoring, and troubleshooting. While large foundations could afford these costs, or could achieve some economies of scale, small foundations simply found it inefficient to fund African work. To some degree the advances in communications technology may help resolve these problems. So too, partnerships among foundations, simple processes to enable small foundations to work internationally, more involvement of corporate foundations, and partnerships among bilateral and multilateral donors and foundations may help more foundations work in Africa.

One might also think about IPR. Inventions made in Africa are generally not exploited. In the past, inventions made in the U.S. academic sector were similarly not exploited, but after changes in US law, universities have made IPR a good source of funding. Similarly, changes in law and policy have helped increase the rate of exploitation of inventions made in U.S. federally funded research labs. Perhaps some help to African institutions in obtaining and managing intellectual property rights might result in more support for S&T through revenues from intellectual property.

AOIR BLOGS

Here is a list of blogs of subscribers to the listserve of the Association of Internet Researchers. It was just posted by by Thomas N. Burg.

INFORMATION AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE

The Economist this week has an article on information technology spending. It describes a theory of technological waves in the industry which it attributes to Steven Milunovich. (Of course technological waves have been around for quite a while.) The idea is that the computer field went through waves: mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, workstations, and the Internet, and is now due for another wave. IT spending has increased over the long run, but it tends to increase faster as a new wave gathers force, and plateau between waves. Thus:

“IT spending (in the 1970s to 1980s) soared from less than 2% of GDP (in the United States) to about 3%. It then stayed at that level for almost a decade, as firms worked out how to get the most out of their machines. In the 1990s, they started investing again, this time in the new technology of client-server systems. By 2000, tech spending was almost 5% of GDP. Since then, it has fallen back to about 4% of GDP.”

The periods of rapid IT spending growth are called “hot tech”, and those of reduced growth or fall-back are called “cold tech.” In the hot tech periods, firms invest in the new hot technology. In the cold tech periods, they invest in systems to make the most of the hot tech they have acquired. Today the interest in Linux systems is illustrative of the cold tech emphasis on value for money.

It also has an article on the electricity infrastructure, and its recent blackouts. It ascribes the fragility of the grids to “half-baked reforms” in deregulation of the industry, that resulted in underinvestment in the grid. Reliability comes from redundancy, and there has to be excess capacity distributed in the system to handle critical conditions. Excessive cost control, or excessive emphasis on paring costs to a minimum result in systems that can’t handle emergency loads, and go into blackout. I suspect the same kinds of problems will confront regulators for the convergent internet based information infrastructure.

MONITORING AND EVALUATION OF ICT PROJECTS

Surprisingly, since I never considered myself an evaluation expert, I have become the editor of the Monitoring and Evaluation topic page of the Development Gateway. The page was originally conceived of as serving the community of Country Gateways being formed around the Development Gateway Foundation.

The Country Gateways are, of course, efforts to utilize Internet technology to provide resources and forums for the economic and social development communities working in and for specific developing nations. Many of the resources we have posted on the M&E topic page therefore deal with the evaluation of portals, and of country gateways.

The DG Foundation not only supports the Country Gateways, but also a network of Research and Training Centers (in India and Korea so far, but with Centers soon to open in China and Rwanda), the Development Gateway Forum, and a grants program working on e-government. These other programs have a common theme of ICT for development. We have therefore been expanding the M&E topic page to provide resources to the participants in those other projects. Thus we have been adding a few resources on evaluation of educational and research programs.

The collection now has passed 150 resources, and seems quite likely to be of interest to a number of people in the Knowledge for Development community. I invite you all to participate. Join as members of the topic page community and receive alerts when new content is added. I would especially invite you to submit useful resources on evaluation and monitoring of ICT for Development projects and programs. There is a lot out there, and I could use support in finding and evaluating resources.

FATE OF GLOBAL WARMING PACT IN DOUBT

The Washington Post today has an article suggesting that Russia may not ratify the Kyoto pact on global warming. The Global Warming Treaty has an unusual element, in that countries contributing 55 percent of greenhouse gasses in 1990 had to ratify the Treaty for it to go into effect. Since the United States of America contributed 36 percent, and Russia contributed 17 percent, these two countries together contributed more than half of all greenhouse gasses, and consequently by both refusing to ratify the treaty could kill it.

The Bush Administration has already refused to ratify the Treaty, and President Putin yesterday made remarks that the Post construed as indicating that Russia may not ratify. The 114 countries that already ratified the Treaty, representing 44 percent of emissions, are probably not pleased!

Hurricane Isabel raised the issue of global warming in our minds here. Since sea level has been raised a foot in the last century, and is expected to rise another foot or two in the next century, flooding in the coastal zones is more of a problem. The storm surge from Isabel, added to tides and a higher sea level, created flooding at previously unrecorded levels in the upper Chesapeake Bay, including Baltimore. If as seems likely, global warming, by putting more energy into the atmosphere, will increase the frequency and magnitude of hurricanes and tropical storms, then we can expect more and worse events like Isabel. Moreover, people are moving to the coasts here, and there will be more people and more construction in the paths of these storms.

What good is it to develop scientific knowledge and understanding of the processes contributing to global warming and of the effects that global warming will have if politicians will not act on the information for the public welfare?

THE UNITED STATES REJOINS UNESCO

The United States resumes it membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization tomorrow, and will contribute US$60 million to its budget. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19512-2003Sep29.html

Anyone interested in Knowledge for Development should be pleased by this event. UNESCO is the keystone organization in the United Nations system for education, and has programs at all levels. While many U.N. organizations are concerned with the science and technology of the specific sectors in which they work, only UNESCO focuses on fundamental research; it however also serves as a convoking agency for many applied research communities. It has lead in the transfer of information and communication technologies to developing countries for decades, and has focused broadly on the media and communications. Its cultural efforts were brought to the fore in trying to save the cultural heritage of Iraq in the recent war and its aftermath, but have been of much wider service to mankind.

The United States should support UNESCO because it leads in efforts that are crucial to international development, and because the United States educational, scientific and cultural communities have things of great value to contribute to its work. We also have much to gain from the collaborations it convenes as well as the information it generates and disseminates.

An article in today’s Washington Post focuses on those in the United States who don’t like UNESCO, and on the reasons the United States Government withdrew from UNESCO 19 years ago. Of course, the most visible part of the article was the First Lady, Barbara Bush’s speech at UNESCO headquarters marking the reentry. It is perhaps appropriate that the president’s wife, who has a special and visible interest in education, lead in this way, especially given the crucial role of an earlier president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, in the creation of the United Nations system. Moreover, her speech was useful, focusing on literacy, quality education, post conflict education, and HIV/AIDS. Still, I would have preferred the Post to explain more fully the real reasons that make it important for the United States to participate in UNESCO.

MORE MISCELLANEOUS COMMENTS

The Economist has a squib reporting research that “a large adult head size was beneficial in preventing cognitive decline, in particular memory.” The epidemiological study also suggested that head size at birth was not a predictor of these benefits. Thus the research would suggest that it is head growth in childhood predicts cognitive and memory longevity. Brain size in children triples from birth to age six. Is this another indication that the high rates of malnutrition and stunting among the poor in developing nations will have negative repercussions on intellectual performance for decades?

More distressing news about AIDS, and especially AIDS in Africa. Three-quarters of the 42 million people infected with HIV in the world are in Africa, and in some countries the epidemic is entering the “death phase” where mortality from AIDS is exceeding the rate of new infections. (This would be good if it were due to a radical reduction of the infection rate, but it is bad as an indication of lots of people having entered the terminal phase of the disease.) There are countries in Africa in which 40 percent of the adult population is infected. Only two percent of the infected are receiving anti-viral treatment!

One seemingly optimistic note has to be taken with a grain of salt. It is reported that studies to date show high rates of compliance among those receiving treatment with the complex and demanding schedules for taking the drug. We know that some groups in Africa have had historically high infection rates – truck drivers, soldiers, teachers. (Women now are the majority of infected.) But the people far enough along in the disease to qualify for treatment might be from these groups, and these groups might be more likely to follow regimes well. Moreover, people who beat the 50 to one odds and get into treatment programs might be more socially adept than their untreated fellows, and thus more likely to handle the treatment well.

There is an article in the Travel section of today’s Washington Post pointing out that exception to the 42 year old U.S. travel embargo to Cuba for "educational, people-to-people contact" is to expire December 31 due to sweeping policy changes made by the Bush Administration in March. The Congress has been considering legislation to make such travel legal (which passed in the House of Representatives), but the Administration has signaled it will veto the legislation if it passes. Another indication of the lack of importance given to international cooperation and understanding by this Administration!

The Bush Administration has reinstituted the so-called “Mexico City Policy” which prohibited provision of U.S. family planning program aid to organizations that practiced or promoted abortions. The new AIDS initiative is also handicapped by this policy. It is not simply a restriction against the use of U.S. tax payers’ funds to finance abortions abroad (which makes some sense since a fairly large portion of the U.S. voters find abortions immoral). Rather it is a gag rule that deprives organizations of needed support for many programs, if they provide information on abortion in other programs (not funded by the U.S. Government). I have always felt that this rule was the antithesis of a Knowledge for Development approach – “keep people in the dark in case they might make choices we don’t like”. It exemplifies the “know nothing” aspect of a portion of U.S. culture. Applying the gag rule to HIV/AIDS assistance seems to me to be immoral. It says in effect, “give up providing information about abortion as a form of birth control, or we will let people die of AIDS.” The policy not only militates against the effectiveness of the funding in counteracting AIDS, it is immoral.

THE INGENUITY GAP

I just started reading "The Ingenuity Gap" by Thomas Homer-Dixon. I think I will probably post more from the book in coming days.

As an example of why I like it, Homer-Dixon quotes (page 28) William McNeill (one of my intellectual heroes):

“intelligence and ingenuity…run a race with all the nasty eventualities that interfere with human hopes and purposes; it is far from clear which is winning.”

The author notes in the Prologue that the postmodern capitalist city is a marvel. “We design our cities to block out intrusions and fluctuations in the natural world so that they will work as smoothly and efficiently and with as little discomfort to their residents as possible.” He notes the amount of ingenuity that has gone into the technology and institutions of the city, and that the ingenuity involved in the design is different than that in the operation of the city.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel, this point can be extended. The modern city, Washington at least, can block out intrusions to a certain extent, but fails when confronted with the full force of nature. A hurricane overcomes the cities homeostatic systems. Another extension is that a still different kind of ingenuity is needed to restore the functioning of the city after major damage from a natural event. Clearly the normal maintenance technology and institutions are insufficient to restore order quickly, yet the task is far less intimidating that building a city (which takes generations).

One of Homer-Dixon’s points is that people who are lucky enough live in these cities don’t really understand the half of the world’s people who are very poor, surviving on the basis of subsistence agriculture and other low-productivity work. I think this is an important point. If you can’t relate the experience of others with your own, you can’t empathize with them. I suspect that the lack of understanding of and empathy for people living at the subsistence level is a good part of the reason that the United States seems willing to spend US$168 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to avoid repetitions of 9/11 and the death of 3,000 people at one stroke, but is not willing to spend more than $2 billion this year on AIDS abroad, which killed 2.2 million people last year in Africa.

I suspect that what Homer-Dixon thinks about under the term “ingenuity” is what I think of as “bringing knowledge and understanding to bear on development” – the topic of this blog.

He makes the point that people who live in modern cities tend to be optimists about civilization’s ability to solve problems, and implies that the half of the world’s population living in poverty may have reason to doubt this ability. In the long run, the doubters may be right! Unfortunately, the most powerful people in the world tend to be drawn from those who are optimistic!

We are doing as well as we are as a result not only because of recent social and technological innovation, but because we are exploiting millennia of accrued social capital. Early critical successes were domestication of plants and animals, agriculture, urbanization, government. Modern success is based on the development of a few key discoveries – steam and internal combustion engines, electricity, the American system of manufacture (interchangeable parts), the production line, materials science, electronics, the research laboratory, markets, democracy, rule of law, etc. How long will it take to fully exploit those discoveries? How many more big discoveries are out there? How fast will they come along?

Homer-Dixon sees ingenuity as a distributed property, as do I. Lots of people are working independently, with limited (local) information to find ways of solving problems and making things better. The modern city frees people from using their ingenuity to solve the myriad of problems of day to day life – supermarkets make it easy to feed the family; cars and public transportation make it easy to move from place to place; ICT makes communication easy; etc., etc. It does so through institutions that have evolved to allow people to apply specialized expertise to specific innovations. So agricultural scientists working in research labs find or make improve crop varieties; biomedical scientists invent and improve drugs and medical processes, engineers find better ways to build things.

I suspect that the key ingenuity in development, underlying all other ingenuity, is involved in developing the institutions that allow people to effectively apply specialized knowledge to specific needs for innovation, and that provide the incentives that they do so. I suspect that modern capitalism is one such institution, that is especially effective for stimulating development of broad classes of technology (but not technologies underlying public goods), and for stimulating ingenuity in the design of new business organizations and processes. I am not sure that civilization has found equally effective institutions underlying other kinds of ingenuity – such as that needed for civil society or government.

IPR IS A STRANGE FIELD

Owner of Dewey Decimal System Sues Hotel for Infringement
Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit organization, holds the rights to Dewey Decimal. The library cataloging system is continually updated, with numbers assigned to more than 100,000 new works each year. The Library Hotel, overlooks the New York Public Library. As an homage to the Dewey Decimal system of classifying books by topic, each floor of the hotel is dedicated to one of 10 Dewey categories. The rooms are named for specific topics, such as room 700.003 for performing arts, with appropriate books inside. The hotel is being sued for trademark infringement as a consequence. From Newsday.com, September 20, 2003.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

I have not posted any comments on the WSIS. Frankly, I am not a big fan of these conferences. The last “big do”, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, gathered tens of thousands of people in South Africa, and I could not help but wonder if more good would not have been done by these folk using their time and money to actually do something for sustainable development, rather than talk about it. There is a famous poem, The Development Game, from a few decades ago that has lines about development experts flocking to luxury hotels to discuss homelessness, and banqueting at expensive restaurants while discussing hunger.

My most intensive experience with one of these was with the United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development in 1979. It seemed to me to be a disaster, exacerbating the hard feelings between rich and poor countries. Still, the Rio Summit seems to me really to have changed peoples attitudes, and been constructive in bringing environmental concerns more fully into the consciousness of development professionals, leading to real programs, policies, and capacity building efforts.

Still, I was concerned with this article by Steven Long, that suggests that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) may walk out of the WSIS. This follows what seems to be their not very constructive actions at the Cancun summit of the WTO.

FOLLOWING UP SOME POSTINGS

The hurricane: Washington is still recovering from the hurricane last week. Living in an information society, we are flooded by information on the event. Knowing that 39 people died, hundreds of thousand of people were without electrical power for days, that houses burned down when their power was restored, and that the damages are measured in the billions of dollars probably makes the situation psychologically worse. I personally in fact suffered no disruption.

In terms of K4D, it is interesting to note how widely disseminated the information gathering and processing was. The infrastructure repair was based on rapid assessment of the damage, and a plan to start up-net and work out with the repairs. Similarly cleanup of the fallen trees was based on a rapid assessment and a prioritized plan. Traffic lights were out, and seemed to be repaired according to priorities, with police stepping in to direct traffic in key intersections.

Cancun: The Economist has a review of the disaster at Cancun. It seems to believe there is enough blame for all – posturing leaders from developing nations, poor negotiators with rigid protectionist positions from Europe, U.S. politicians who could not overcome local interests to achieve an agreement for the greater good, NGOs that complicated the process, and an ineffective WTO structure and process. Really a sad event, given that “a successful Doha round could raise global income by more than $500 billion a year by 2015. Over 60% of that gain would go to poor countries, helping to pull 144m people out of poverty.”

Incidentally, another article, “Who guards the guardians?” gives international NGOs in the environmental field a poor report card.

Software: Sun has announced new, very low prices for server software, a PC operating system, and an office suite. The idea is to disrupt the “commodity” software business in a way analogous to Dell’s disruption of the PC business. We have seen stories of Microsoft dropping prices on PC software, and of increasing interest in free and open software. And of course in developing countries, a lot of people just pirate the stuff. I suspect that this is the beginning of a process that will see the cost of the basic software for the developing country PC go very low.

UNITED STATES WITHDRAWING FROM SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION

Two stories in this weeks Science magazine (19 Sep 2003) suggested a worrisome trend.

Article 1:The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has withdrawn some key membership privileges from engineers in Iran, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan as a result of because the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control’s position (or the lack of clarity of its position) about the permissible roles of people from these countries in S&T professional societies. While this is the only professional society I know of to have taken this step, it is important because the IEEE alone publishes some 30 percent of world literature in its field. 1,700 engineers are affected directly in Iran, and I assume many more are affected indirectly.

Article 2: Myanmar (Burma) has a serious HIV/AIDS problem (perhaps 500,000 to 700,000 adults infected), and its government is probably not taking sufficiently forceful steps to control the epidemic. The U.S. Center for Disease Control, CDC, sent a team in 2002 to assess the situation, with the approval of the U.S. and Myanmar governments, as well as with the support of the Myanmar opposition. The team issued a report seriously critical of the situation, and proposed a collaborative program to help non-governmental organizations improve their services. The report was accepted by the Government of Myanmar, but the effort was stopped by higher-ups in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (If there is one place politics should stop, it is in collaboration to help limit the AIDS epidemic, and especially in this part of Asia.)

And from Yahoo:

U.S. to Sharply Cut Number of High-Tech Visas
Lead: “The United States is about to cut the number of employment visas it offers to highly qualified foreign workers from 195,000 to 65,000, immigration experts said on Monday.” By Alan Elsner, Yahoo News/Reuters, Sep 22, 2003.

FORBES 400 RICHEST PEOPLE

Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 400 richest people in the United States is a guilty pleasure. I recommend the website especially because it is so well illustrated, and uses the World Wide Web so effectively to present data, that it should be an example to us all.