Testing a link to youTube.com

National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery

Black and White Jumping Spider from the collection.

The U.S. National Science Foundation provides this website with a large number of downloadable

* Images (1211)
* Videos (70)
* Audios (248)

and more. This is a rich body of resources on science and active scientific research.

I especially like the Nanoscience screen saver (for computers).

"Search Me? Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. Publishers Say Read the Fine Print First."

Read the full article by Bob Thompson, The Washington Post, August 13, 2006.

This article describes Google's plans to create the greatest digital library the world has ever seen, and its current effort to digitize the nine million books in the library of Stanford University. Already, Google's engineers have developed sophisticated technology for the purpose.

"When Google announced the library scanning project, in December 2004, it had four library partners besides Stanford. Two of them (Oxford University and the New York Public Library) took a legally cautious approach to digitization, permitting Google to copy only public domain works. A third, the University of Michigan, took the opposite view, asserting forcefully that Google could scan every one of its 7 million books. Harvard hedged its bets, initially agreeing only to a limited test program. Last week, the University of California signed on as a sixth Google partner. Its scanning program will include both public domain and copyrighted material."

In September 2005,

"the Authors Guild filed a class action suit against Google, seeking statutory damages and an injunction to halt the scanning. A month later, five major publishers -- McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons -- sued as well, with the support of the AAP" (Association of American Publishers".

Because whole books or even whole pages are not displayed, Google's supporters argue that

"making copyrighted books searchable is the kind of 'transformative use' permitted under copyright law. The publishers and the Authors Guild completely disagree, arguing that Google's unlicensed creation and retention of digital copies -- as well as its creation of additional copies for the libraries -- are illegal."

The Global Pandemic Initiative

Lead: " IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, today announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases." The press release continues: "With growing concerns over potential outbreaks of new strains of disease, and their ability to spread more easily because of modern transportation, IBM scientists have formed a steering committee with worldwide health organizations and universities to guide efforts to address the issue. Together, they will explore the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness program for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world." IBM, 15 May 2006

IBM Press room - 2006-05-15 IBM, Public Health Groups Form Global Pandemic Initiative - United States

IBM Press room - 2006-05-15 IBM, Public Health Groups Form Global Pandemic Initiative - United States

IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in May announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases.

The press release stated:

With growing concerns over potential outbreaks of new strains of disease, and their ability to spread more easily because of modern transportation, IBM scientists have formed a steering committee with worldwide health organizations and universities to guide efforts to address the issue. Together, they will explore the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness program for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world.

The Economist this week commented that The Global Pandemic Initiative

is a collaboration between the WHO and the CDC, together with IBM, a large computer firm, and over a dozen other groups. It is intended to develop “the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness programme for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks.” One approach IBM hopes to take is to develop software that will help predict how diseases might spread.

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)

GPHIN is a secure, Internet-based "early warning" system that gathers preliminary reports of public health significance in seven languages on a real-time, 24/7 basis. GPHIN gathers and disseminates relevant information on disease outbreaks and other public health events by monitoring global media sources such as news wires and web sites. The information is filtered for relevancy by an automated process, and then analyzed by Public Health Agency of Canada GPHIN officials. The output is categorized and made accessible to users. Notifications about public health events that may have serious public health consequences are immediately forwarded to users. According to the Economist magazine, "Sun Microsystems, Google and several big Silicon Valley venture-capital funds and investors. They are helping to develop a new “web crawler” that will expand GPHIN to track newspapers and internet blogs in 40 to 100 languages."

Literacy in the United States

There is an article in the current Scientific American (September 2006) by Rodger Doyle on the results of a study of literacy in the United States. It divides literacy into three types:
· Prose Literacy (The skills needed to comprehend and use information from continuous texts such as newspaper articles.)
· Document Literacy (The knowledge and skills needed to comprehend and use information from noncontinuous texts such as simple statistical tables.)
· Quantitative Literacy (The knowledge and skills needed to identify and perform computations using numbers embedded in printed materials such as tax forms. Examples: calculating a tip or loan rate.

The study showed that prose and document literacy were decreasing slightly for the total population, but that quantitative literacy was increasing, based on the difference in performance measured in the survey in 1992 and 2003. However the results were worse for high school graduates, college graduates and those with graduate degrees than for the population as a whole. Not only did prose and document literacy decrease notably for all three groups, but quantitative literacy decreased quite a bit for college graduates and those with graduate degrees. Sad news/

It occurred to me to post on the interpretation of this data. How can overall changes in literacy look better than the changes in literacy for high school, college and graduate school graduates? It is possible, for example, that the remaining population (e.g. non high school graduates) did much better on the tests in 2003 than in 1992.

Perhaps more likely that people were getting more education in 2003 than in 1992. Since it is likely that high school grads are more literate than those who don’t graduate from high school, that college grads are more literate than high school grads who don’t graduate from college, and that people with graduate degrees are more literate than college grads without graduate degrees, increasing education levels in the population might account for performance of the total population appearing better than performance for any of the subpopulations with specific levels of education.

Indeed, if the cohorts of people completing each level of education are increasing as a percentage of the overall population, I would expect literacy levels to decrease at each level of education. Those who would have dropped out of school in the past because they were having trouble, would be more likely to stay involved;

The article references two studies:

· A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century
· The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective

Arden L. Bement on International Science

Arden L. Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation

"On the international scale, our value will be measured by our global research networks and our partnerships with fast-growing research economies. On the West Coast, you are in an excellent position to collaborate with Asian nations in biology, chemistry, physics, and materials science." Arden Bement at Harvey Mudd College, January 14, 2006.

Dr. Bement has demonstrated a strong interest in international scientific cooperation, and given that the National Science Board has a task force in operation on International Science to advise the NSF, it seems useful to consider his statements on the topic. Here are links to some recent talks that he has given:

* "International Cooperation, The Future of Science and Engineering" (May 25, 2006, National Natural Science Foundation of China 20th Anniversary Celebration, Beijing, China)
* "Collaboration and Competition: What Can Governments Do?" (May 15, 2006, G8 Heads of Research Councils Meeting, Paris, France)
* "Crossing Borders to Advance the Frontier: NSF's Role in International Outreach" (April 22, 2006, American Physical Society Meeting, Dallas, Texas)
* "Global Connections: National Science Foundation International Programs and Activities" (June 22, 2005Remarks, Global Conference of Environment, Science, Technology and Health Officers, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC)

Workshop - Enhancing the Effectiveness of Sustainability Partnerships: Addressing the Challenge of Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainability

Workshop - Enhancing the Effectiveness of Sustainability Partnerships: Addressing the Challenge of Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainability: "The Task Force on Linking Knowledge with Action for Sustainable Development is organizing a workshop for August 30-31, 2006 at the Jonsson Center in Woods Hole, MA to explore the emerging role of public-private partnerships in addressing the challenges to harnessing science and technology for sustainable development."

International Task Force on Global Public Goods - gpgtaskforce.org

International Task Force on Global Public Goods - gpgtaskforce.org: "The International Task Force on Global Public Goods was created through an agreement between France and Sweden signed on 9 April 2003. The Task Force's mandate is to assess and prioritize international public goods, global and regional, and make recommendations to policy makers and other stakeholders on how to improve and expand their provision."

More on the NSB Task Force on International Science

(This posting is an update on my earlier posting on the Task Force.)

I attended the meeting of the Task Force on Tuesday, August 9. This was a very brief meeting, which spent most of its time inducting new members to the Task Force and reviewing the draft report of the March Roundtable held by the Task Force. That report focused on:

The rationale for U.S. government interest in international science and engineering
* The challenges of increasing international cooperation in science and engineering
* Global engagement in science and engineering
* New modes for participation in international science and engineering

The Task Force will complement its Roundtable Discussion on International Science Partnerships with additional meetings:

* In Singapore in late September to be held in conjunction with the 31st Meeting of the Industrial Science and Technology Working Group of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation organization.
* Informal meetings in the Middle East later this year
* A meeting in Europe in the Spring of 2007 in conjunction with a meeting of European Ministers of Science.

The Task Force is to complete its report to the President in the Summer of 2007. I expect the report to be made public, and to strongly recommend new initiatives to improve international scientific cooperation.

Science and Technology in the Era of Globalization

UNU/UNESCO International Conference
23 & 24 August 2006

This conference provides a forum for exploring how we can better, and more directly, harness scientific and technological progress for the promotion of peace and sustainable development.

It covers such salient issues as access to knowledge and benefit-sharing, the scope of intellectual property protection, and the ethical boundaries of scientific enquiry, with the aim of delineating the parameters within which societies can utilize the processes of globalization to foster the creation and diffusion of knowledge for the benefit of all.

In the public symposium on 23 August, eminent experts from around the world review the ways in which globalization is changing science and technology, and vice-versa, and assess the opportunities that these changes offer.

In the workshop on 24 August, panellists discuss how science and technology link with, and contribute to, economic and social development in four fundamental areas — knowledge-sharing, trade and technology transfer, society and policy-making, and science and technology education for sustainable development — and how globalization is influencing these processes.

The U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series

The U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series invites world leaders to speak on the role of the United Nations in addressing the challenges facing the world's peoples and nations in the twenty-first century. It is co-sponsored by the United Nations University (UNU) Centre, the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) and the Science Council of Japan (SCJ).

Past lectures are webcast. The website includes brief bios of the speakers. Speakers include:

* Shirin Ebadi (2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner) "Women in Nation Building"
* Peter Doherty (1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine) Science, Society and the Challenge of the Future
* Jimmy Carter "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa"
* Ahmed H. Zewail (1999 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa" and
* Norman E. Borlaug (1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner) "Agriculture, Development and Human Rights in the Future of Africa"

Mohammad Khatami (Former President of Iran) is to speak on August 25th on "Dialogue Among Civilizations: A Necessity for Living in Peace and Non-Violence, Bridging the Development Gap among Nations, and Building a Global Citizenship"

Heritage Health Index Selected Data

Heritage Health Index Selected Data: "Heritage Health Index data on the condition of natural science collections was recently presented at the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and Natural Science Collections Alliance in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The majority of the U.S.’s 820 million zoological, botanical, geological, paleontological, and paleobotany specimens are held in what Heritage Preservation has classified as “science museums” and “archaeological repositories or scientific research collections,” which include government agencies or universities that would not be classified as museums. Science museums include natural history museums, science technology museums, planetariums, and the non-living collections at nature centers, arboretums, botanical gardens, aquariums, and zoos."

Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land - Google Video

Two friends independently sent me the link to this video, which is about ah hour and a quarter long. A third friend said he had seen it, and that it drew attention to the failures of U.S. media to adequately inform the public about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It certainly does make that case. (It does not make the case that this failure is only one aspect of a massive failure of the media here, but I think such a case can be made.)

The video is far more on the side of the Palestinians that we are used to seeing. I don't know whether it is more or less fair that the media coverage it reproaches. But it is riviting video.

For this blog, I would underline one point that the video makes very well -- what we think we know is based on the information we receive. Part of the difference between European and U.S. public opinion on the wars in the Middle East is surely due to the very different coverage of those wars by European and U.S. media.

For U.S. chovenists, let me underline a point made in the film. Brittish journalists are far more aggressive in questioning their on-air sources than are U.S. journalists, and the difference is important. I think it clear that Brittish journalism is superior to ours in this respect.

The film makes what should be an obvious point, that various factions work hard to influence the content of the media, and that not all do so with equal success. Unfortunately, the most successful need not be those who are most accurate and balanced in their reporting.

One suggestion that I would make is that we all try to access media from different countries. I wish that more U.S. citizens could do so in languages other than English. I am pleased that more kids are studying abroad, since they will have the opportunity to use foreign media, and may learn to value the alternative viewpoint those media provide.

I suggest that the video might also help to be a little more humble in evaluating what we think we know!

National Science Board Task Force on International Science

In September 2001, the Board released a report entitled, Towards a More Effective Role for the U.S. Government in International Science and Engineering (NSB-01-187). Many of the recommendations from that report remain valid, but are largely unfulfilled. Since the time this report was prepared, there have also been considerable shifts in the international landscape. These shifts, along with the unfulfilled recommendations of the 2001 report, have been judged to warrant a careful reexamination of the role of the U.S. Government in international S&E.

Thus the National Science Board has organized a Task Force on International Science to address the many changes that have occurred in the global S&E dynamics related to research, education, politics, and technical workforce.

The Task Force held its first Hearing and Roundtable Discussion on International Science Partnerships on Thursday, May 11, 2006. This one-day event was co-hosted by the Center for International Science & Technology Policy, and took place at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C. A final agenda for that meeting is available here.

The next meeting of the Task Force is to be held on Wednesday, August 9, 2006. It will be held in Room 1235 of the National Science Foundation building from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.. (4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22230, USA) This meeting is part of the more general meeting of the National Science Board taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Acting Executive Secretary of the Task Force is: Clara A. Englert cenglert@nsf.gov
(703) 292-7000

Higher Education in Developing Nations

I have long thought that donor agencies under-fund higher education in developing nations. I think a part of the problem is that the economic analysis of the benefits of high education has been seriously flawed. The ones I have seen have focused on returns to the graduates, and on the efficiency of the educational process itself.

Of course, if students take forever to get through third rate schools, only to find that they can’t get jobs when the graduate, and leave for greener pastures in other countries as soon as they can, it makes little sense to throw good money after bad. Economic analysis can illuminate such problems.

Of course, it is important and useful to study the stream of income received by people according to the education that they have received, and to figure out things like the present value of the increment in future earnings per unit of additional education.

However, projecting such calculations into the future is perilous. Take the example of Ireland. For many years it provided university education to its youth, only to see a large number of the graduates emigrate abroad. Many were concerned that the national investment in education was bearing inadequate returns. However, when new government policies and entry to the European Common Market encouraged foreign direct investment in Ireland, lots of jobs were created. Not only did new graduates remain in the country, but increasing numbers of emigrants returned. The returns to higher education suddenly looked much better.

It is hard for economists to document the benefits to society that come from higher education when those are not captured in the incomes of the graduates, but I think those external benefits can be extremely important. The economic impacts of trying to run a nation with too few teachers, engineers, and doctors are very severe.

The returns to educational expenses for the creation of the cadres of such professionals are highly non-linear. I would predict that the rate of return is likely to be low when the number is below some critical mass, and then to increase. Thus as the number of engineers gets to the point where they can manage the building, operation and maintenance of an adequate infrastructure well, the returns per engineer entering into the workforce are high. (Of course, this assumes that the overall national policy environment is conducive to the growth and efficient operation of that infrastructure.) However, training more professionals that will be usefully employed in their professional occupations quickly becomes a losing proposition.

In these circumstances, good economic analysis requires that not only that the average return to investment be calculated, but the marginal returns to additional investments in training different kinds of professionals – a very difficult analytical task!

The Science-Based Professions

Readers of this blog know that I am very much concerned with the development of the science-based applied professions in developing nations. These include medicine and engineering, but also professions in areas like agriculture, forestry, mining, and meteorology.

It has not escaped policy makers that it is more expensive to train people for such professions than it is to train people in the liberal arts. It seems to have escaped many of them that the returns from training adequate numbers of such people are also quite high, and those returns justify the educational investment.

The Management Professions

It would seem that in the last decade or two, an increasing number of people have come to recognize the benefits of university training for the cadre of people needed to manage an economy. This training includes training in business management, public administration, health service administration, educational administration, etc. It also includes training in ancillary areas from accounting to information systems.

Without people to efficiently and effectively manage large organizations, societies can’t modernize. Higher education has a demonstrated capacity to train large numbers of managers to high standards quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, some countries have also managed to demonstrate how to use higher education badly for this purpose.

Nation Building

I spent time in Uganda and Kazakhstan this summer. Both are multi-ethnic societies involved in nation building after the collapse of empire states. The experience has made me think more about the role of higher education in nation building.

I once heard someone say that part of the problem with Idi Amin was that he was very poorly educated. I suspect that is true, and that one of the problems of post-colonial countries is that they don’t have cadres of political leaders who have been educated to the appropriate standards for leading a nation. Jared Diamond says something similar in “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”. He suggests that the European societies, that used books extensively, had leaders with wide knowledge and understanding of political precedents, and were consequently able to outmaneuver the societies in Africa, Oceana, and the Americas that did not use books in the same way.

As I understand it, nationalism in the 19th century focused on nations as communities of people with a common language and common culture. It emphasized the nation-state, in which the borders of the political state were coterminous with the geographic extent of the one-language, one-culture community. That is a model that is difficult to apply in either Uganda or Kazakhstan, or indeed in many parts of the world.

The United States, in contrast has been a “nation of immigrants”. Nationalism here has included many different ethnic groups, with many different cultural backgrounds, who at least on arrival spoke many different languages. The melting pot assimilated these immigrants, helping them learn English, making their cultures more accepting of others, encouraging them to internalize U.S. political culture, and imbuing them with nationalistic fervor for the United States.

The U.S. public educational system was a critical element in this nation building, and I suspect that the higher education system was a keystone element. We still struggle in this country with integrating our ethnically diverse population, and with accommodating the continuing influx of immigrants into the core national civic culture, and we do so at a time when the information infrastructure and institutions are changing rapidly. It is not clear we will continue to succeed, even as well as we did in the past. Still, U.S. mass public education, including mass university education is an important model.

Again, I am not sure how the economists deal with the nation building aspects of education and higher education, but I fear that they tend to leave them as unmeasured externalities, and thus to leave them out of the sight and out of the minds of policy makers.

Conclusion

Higher education is too important to economic, political and social development to be underfunded. It is also too important to be done badly, and where the quality or efficiency of higher education is too low to justify investments in education per se, serious consideration should be given to investing in reform.

The World Is Calling

The World Is Calling: "The number of students receiving college credit abroad keeps rising. During the past 20 years, it has nearly tripled, to about 175,000 in the 2003-04 academic year, the last year for which statistics are available."

Subtitle: "Area College Students Join Those Hitting the Books Overseas in Record Numbers"

By Susan Kinzie, The Washington Post, August 8, 2006.

"Why do economists spend valuable time blogging?"

Read the full article in The Economist of August 3, 2006 (subscription required).

Like most bloggers, I think that question would only be asked by an old fogy. I suppose that the Economist is a special kind of old fogy -- one that thinks people only do things for financial rewards. The answer: I suppose economists spend time blogging because they can and they want to.

The article identifies some very interesting blogs done by economists:

* Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal
* The Becker-Posner Blog
* Greg Mankiw's Blog
^ Brad Setser's Web Log

"Advocates Say U.S. Bars Many Academics"

Read the full article by Anushka Asthana in The Washington Post, August 4, 2006.

Subtitle: "Government Says It Rarely Uses Law Regarding Those Who 'Espoused Terrorism'"

This article implies that a growing number of foreign scholars have had visas have been revoked or visa applications denied becaues of their ideological or political views. It illustrates the situation using the cases of:

* Waskar Ari (A Bolivian Aymara Indian seeking to take up his professorship at the University of Nebraska after completing his PhD in the U.S.)
* Yoannis Milios (a professor from Greece, who was detained and interrogated about his politics for several hours at JFK Airport before his visa was revoked.)
* Dora Maria Téllez (A Nicaraguan who gave up a post at Harvard University after the government rejected her visa application.)
* Tariq Ramadan (a prominent Swiss Islamic scholar whose visa was revoked.)

A spokesperson for the American Association of University Professors said that the says "the problem is growing. 'This places a serious chill on the exercise of academic freedom.'"

"The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking up to 15 cases.......in which it thinks people have been banned for their beliefs. While ideology is rarely given as the official reason, the ACLU said academics increasingly are being interrogated about their political beliefs when they apply for visas."

The article concludes:

If the United States is excluding visa applicants based on ideology, there will be ramifications, said Robert M. O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

"It is not just the people who are turned down," he said. "If there are a number of sensitive and conscientious people who decide it is not worth coming at all and decide to go to another country, then we in the U.S. are the losers."