A cautionary tale: Where numbers come from

Megan Carpentier posted on AirAmerica suggesting that the magic number 30 appears much more frequently than one would expect in reports of collateral damage of air strikes in Afghanistan. She attributes that to a rule that field commanders are required to obtain Washington permission for an air strike that would have more than 30 killed as collateral damage. Field commanders probably don't like bothering top officials in Washington nor waiting for permission, and so decide that strikes are unlikely to cause more than the magic number of deaths and injuries. And of course, in post reporting of actual casualties military bureaucrats are not likely to tell Washington that the rule of 30 had not been followed. Do they round down the estimates? It certainly seems possible.

It is always a good idea to look at the distribution of repeated numerical estimates, and if that distribution appears unlikely, to question the accuracy of the estimation process!

Climat Change is Going to Flood Egypt

This is the Nile delta, with sea level rises of 1 meter (dark blue) and 2 meters (light blue), along with population density (lighter to darker browns) and urban areas (hatching). Of the 40.2 million people here in 2000, 10.7 million would be inundated by a 2-meter rise. The inset shows the distribution of farmlands. Credit: Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University

The Nile Delta is not only one of the cradles of civilization, but historically one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. A combination of factors threatens to put a lot of it under water.

• An estimated half of the delta is less than one meter above sea level. Climate change is likely to result in a sea level rise that will flood much or all of this area. There are already areas flooded, and other lands are being damaged by salt from sea water that is intruding into the ground water.
• Worst case estimates are that sea level might rise by 2 meters by 2100.
• Prior to the construction of the Aswan dam, the Nile flooded each year, inundating the Nile Delta and depositing rich soil in the process. That process has ended.
• The population of Egypt is something like 82 million, and it is still growing at something like 2 percent per year.
• It is estimated that half of all food production in Egypt, that in the low lying Delta, is threatened by sea level rise.
• Millions of people live in the threatened area, and Egypt has been trying to settle more there to relieve the crowding of urban areas.
• Per capita GDP of Egypt is $5,800 -- not bad by global standards but hardly enough to deal with huge losses in agricultural production and mass migration of people from a flooded Delta plane.
• Government has been quite stable in Egypt, but my reading of Egyptian culture suggests that the people really focus on water and agriculture and that massive loss of the Nile Delta to sea water incursion would be destabilizing.
• Egypt is not only a key ally of the United States in the Arab world, but it has been a major source of stabilization for the entire region.

I am not happy with the impact of sea level rises in the next few decades on Egypt!

Human Rights Day -- December 10th

It was great to hear President Obama stress the importance of human rights in his speech on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. It was especially appropriate that he did so on human rights day.

Read the transcript of the speech.

Ester Brimmer, the Assistant Secretary of State responsible for International Organizational Affairs made the following comment on the day:

December 10th marks Human Rights Day, a day that affords us all the opportunity to reflect on human rights conditions in our own countries and across the globe in the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That Declaration, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, outlined the equal and inalienable rights of all people, and has since served as the benchmark for the extension and protection of fundamental rights and liberties.

The United States is a leading voice in this continuing effort, and earlier this year amplified that voice by seeking and winning a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council – the body charged with promoting the ideals embodied in the Universal Declaration. Joining the Human Rights Council underscores our determination to engage in a collaborative spirit on these core issues.

The United States does not underestimate the challenge – the world has made great strides in the last six decades, but too many around the world remain subject to human rights abuses and restricted freedoms and liberties. Traveling the remaining distance to a world without such abuses will require us to heed President Obama’s call to action – that all nations should work together to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. As we mark Human Rights Day, the United States is dedicated to that approach, and will aspire with all like-minded nations toward a world in which the Universal Declaration is universally upheld.

More about the WP coverage of Copenhagen

The other day I posted on James Fallows damning article on the failure of The Washington Post to debunk the right wing interpretation of the leaked emails from the East Anglia Climate Change center; The New York Times did its duty and let its readers know that the right wing charges were inflated and contradicted the consensus of the scientific community.

Following my posting (and without doubt in complete ignorance of my opinions, not that they would have mattered anyway) The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Sarah Palin that followed the line of the climate change deniers.

Now Mark Ambinder has used The Atlantic to publish a rebuttal, point by point, of the Palin piece. Good for him!

Information Literacy

With the Internet, especially, we now have access to lots of sources of information. "Information literacy" is in part the ability to evaluate the information we receive to make informed decisions as to its credibility. Certainly an indicator of the credibility of information is the credibility of its source. Newspaper editors should work very hard to protect the credibility of their papers.

I still attach strong credibility to the reporting of The New York Times, tho less than I once did. I find the credibility I attach to the reporting of The Washington Post is diving.

Of course, the source is only one factor. Another is the process by which information is generated. The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involved review of the scientific literature and development of consensus among many hundreds of distinguished scientists, seems especially worthy of respect. Indeed, as I have associated with one of the principals of the study and have great respect for him, I tend to believe even more in the work of the IPCC.

As many postings have shown in the past, I found the environmental assertions of the Bush administration to be suspect. That judgment leads me also to distrust the assertions of Sarah Palin, the Republican successor to George Bush as the spokesperson for a wing of the Republican party.

Of course when I am faced with two diametrically opposed pieces of information, the fact that one is more credible than the other leads me to further downgrade the confidence I place on the source of the less credible assertions.

A thought on reading about Andy Jackson

I just finished reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. It is a quite readable book providing a lot of information about Jackson and the Jacksonian age, about which I knew very little. Not surprising for a book that won the Pulitzer Prize.

Meacham seems to believe Jackson was a vary complex man whose personality was marked by many contradictions. I wonder whether that it true.

He was obviously touched by enormous good luck. Simply to have survived two great gunshot wounds and two later assassination attempts while he was in office required great luck. He must also have had great talent, else how could a poor orphan become a lawyer, successful general, and ultimately president of the United States.

But he seems a man who displayed the culture of his time and place. As a child he and his brothers fought for the revolutionary side in the American Revolution, and he saw his two brothers die as a result, so no wonder he was for the Union. He grew up poor, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants in South Carolina, so it does not surprise me that he bought slaves as soon as he was able to do so and that he supported the institution of slavery, nor that he fought against the native Americans and thought nothing of taking their land to give it to men of his own race and class, nor that he took the side of the working man against that of the oligarchy.

Only Yesterday

Yesterday my book club discussed Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen. A best seller when it was first published 80 years ago, it is still in print and remains a good read. The book describes the trends of the 1920s that were most evident to a thoughtful contemporary observer. I found it useful to look up some data on the demographic and economic differences between that time and our own to put the book in context. We are a much bigger, richer, more urban and better educated society today than in the 1920s.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I was impressed at how many of the problems of the 1920s we have repeated. There was the stock market bubble and crash, somewhat worse one hopes that that of today, the real estate bubble and crash in the sun state, social dysfunction in the wake of legislation against intoxicating substances (prohibition of alcohol then and drugs today), and the red scares of the 1920s and the McCarthy era.

I was struck on the other hand between the demilitarization following World War I versus the creation of the self sustaining military industrial complex after World War II, or the better job done in the 40s of creating an intergovernmental institutional framework to prevent future world wars as compared with the failure of the League of Nations.

During the discussion we noted the difference between formal and informal institutions. The governmental regulation of financial markets seems prototypically formal, implemented by formal organizations established by legislative charter after formal Congressional debate (with the influence of lobbyists). The sexual revolutions of the 20s and 60s seem prototypically informal, occurring both within and external to the institution of marriage, but largely a cultural evolution.

Of course neither is a pure example.

• The reaction to the Madoff and Pearlman Ponzi schemes shows how much informal friendship relations intruded into financial systems, there regulation, and the response to fraud.
• There has certainly been a lot of debate about sexual mores in religious and other institutions.

In our rapidly changing world, it behooves us to improve the process of deliberation on and evolution of institutional behavior. I would guess that specific issues could be located on the continuum from mostly formal to mostly informal. In all cases we should probably be worried about improving both the evolution of informal institutional elements and the deliberate modification of formal institutional elements.

Anyway, our group agreed that Only Yesterday was a good read -- thought provoking about not only the time of our parents or grandparents but also about the parallels and differences with today.

My friend Julianne says this is a must watch!

Are you using Zunia.org, the development portal?

I just posted my 19,000th resource for the community of readers of Zunia. I hope you are using the resources that others and I have made available!

Living Stories on Google Labs

Google has joined with The New York Times and The Washington Post to create a new website with continuing coverage of key stories. Here are some links to current stories:

• The Politics of Global Warming
• Battling Swine Flu
• The struggle over Health Care
• Washington Tackles Health Care Reform

The Washington Post is on the way down!

NASA's Blue Marble -- the only planet we have

James Fallows points out, for The Atlantic, that The New York Times did a much better job covering the story of the leaked emails on climate change than did The Washington Post. I quote his conclusion:

In this case one big-time paper, the Post, sticks with "critics contend," while the other presents a contrast between "decades of peer-reviewed science" and politically-motivated opposition. Moreover, the NYT presents the controversy as something that might get in the way of deliberations in Copenhagen; while the Post presents it as a scandal in which "wonky" emails may not constitute "proof" that climate change is a "lie or a swindle" but still justify introducing "lie" and "swindle" as possibilities.

Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another "-Gate" style flap where it's hard to get to the bottom of the story. While I don't claim to be a climate expert, the overwhelming balance of what I've read convinces me that the Times's approach is right.

So how does The Washington Post respond. It publishes an op-ed piece by failed Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin titled "Copenhagen's political science". She writes:

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

It has been suggested that climate science is "not settled" but is still in flux. In one sense that is true, and in another it is dramatically false. It is true that thousands of scientists are working hard to measure the climate and the factors which drive climate change and to elucidate the complex global systems of interaction between sun, land, sea and atmosphere, and that it is very likely that they will improve our understanding of climate greatly in coming decades.

It is not true that there is serious debate among scientists as to whether anthropogenic global warming is taking place nor whether global warming is likely to get worse over the coming decades. The vast majority of scientists agree on these conclusions, and in fact there has been an unprecedentedly serious effort to document that agreement for the benefit of policy makers.

Let me argue by analogy. The theory of gravity is not settled, in the sense that scientists are still working to reconcile it with quantum theory and to discover a fundamental particle accounting for gravity. Still, since Newton theory has been adequate to predict very accurately the paths of comets and planets, and indeed to predict the return of comets and the existence of previously unknown planetary objects by disturbances in the orbits of known ones. With Einstein's theory, it became possible to explain gravitational lensing and to predict orbits of satellites with sufficient accuracy to allow our GPS systems to work. The theory of gravity may not be complete, but it is adequate for practical purposes.

So too, our understanding of climate change man not be complete, but it is adequate for the practical purpose of developing policy to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and to ameliorate the negative consequences to people of the changes we will not avoid. This is especially true if we accept the "precautionary principle" that we should take out insurance against problems that are not certain to arise, but which might with reasonable probability arise.

It is not the science of climate change that is political, but the reaction of Sarah Palin. Unfortunately, other politicians are seeking to deny the science and polls indicate that a significant number of American voters are being misled by their propaganda.

It should be clear that there are some rich people who will lose potential profits in the short run if and when regulations are put in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that there are very large numbers of poor and middle income people who will suffer greatly unless those regulations are put in place. Do you suppose Palin is seeking funding from and reflecting the interests of the rich minority or the majority?

Who believes that journalism major, soccer mom, failed governor and failed candidate Palin knows anything about climate science anyway?

The Washington Post, historically a great newspaper, seems to be losing the groove. Not all opinions are equally worthy of newspaper space. Some are credible, some are simply wrong!

How bad with the H1N1 Flu Pandemic turn out to be?

Source: The Washington Post

"The analysis, based on data collected in New York City and Milwaukee, indicates that the virus may directly cause 6,000 to 45,000 deaths (in the United States) by the end of the winter, with the final toll probably falling between 10,000 and 15,000, Lipsitch said. In the worst-case scenario, the swine flu pandemic would kill no more than about 60,000 people, his new analysis concluded."

Comment: Remember, the H1N1 flu is just one of several strains of the virus, and there are other flu strains circulating that will cause the normal seasonal flu, and will also kill people in the United States. Still, this is a very comforting result. JAD

Do you believe in global warming?

Source: BBC News

There are now 1.7 billion Internet users

I had intended to provide a graph from this site showing Internet penetration by region to jazz up the posting, but the site copyrights the figure rather than put it in the public domain. So here is an alternative image,

Years 1996 - 2005

Image Source: Peter Gerrand

"Estimating Linguistic Diversity on the Internet:

A Taxonomy to Avoid Pitfalls and Paradoxes"

Check out Internet World Stats, the source of the estimate of current users.

"MIT team wins Darpa's treasure hunt in less than one day"

Source: The Guardian

"A $40,000 online challenge proposed by the US government has been won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - just hours after it was launched.

"The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.

"Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa - the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving."

What a great project! At an average of &10 prize money per team, Darpa got 4,000 teams to focus on how to use social networking. In the process Darpa demonstrated the power of the approach. Who would have thought a team in Cambridge (Mass.) could locate ten balloons released all over the United States in nine hours? In addition, Darpa got worldwide attention to both itself and to the power of social networking. And all was accomplished at low cost!

"It looks like ‘microlending’ doesn’t actually do much to fight poverty"

My friend Julianne suggested this article from the Boston Globe. I quote:

two new research papers suggest that microcredit is not nearly the powerful tool it has been made out to be. The papers, by leading development economists affiliated with MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab, have not yet been published, but they are already being called the most thorough, careful studies yet done on the topic. What they find is that, by most measures, microcredit does not offer a way out of poverty. It helps a few of the more entrepreneurial poor to start up businesses, and at the margins it may boost the profits of existing microenterprises, but that doesn’t translate into gains for the borrowers, as measured by indicators like income, spending, health, or education. In fact, most microcredit clients actually spend their borrowed money not on a business, but on household expenses, on paying off other debts or on a relatively big-ticket item like a TV or a daughter’s wedding. And while microcredit champions point to microloans as a tool for empowering women, the studies see no impact on gender roles, and find evidence that if any one group benefits more, it’s male entrepreneurs with existing businesses.

Comment: I guess I have been around too long, but I have given up on silver bullets to end poverty.

Still, microcredit programs do have a place in the development pantheon. They can make a big difference for a few people, some difference for many. JAD

Image source

From Jeff Sachs' Column

in the December, 2009.Scientific American:

Since 1970 the population has risen from 3.7 billion to 6.9 billion and continues to increase by around 80 million a year. Food production per person has declined in some big regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa. In India the doubling of population has absorbed almost all of the increase in grain production.

Food production accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions when one tallies those from fossil fuels used in growing, preparing and transporting food; the carbon dioxide released by clearing land for farming and pastures; the methane from rice paddies and ruminant livestock; and the nitrous oxide from fertilizer use.

Comment: Crop improvement is always based on changing the genetic makeup of the crop. In traditional breeding, the changes are made wholesale. Using biotechnology the changes are made retail. Of course, and new crop depends for its productivity on its match to local growing circumstances, and of course any new crop should be proven safe. But the irrational fear of GM crops, especially that based on ignorance, is keeping the world from full exploitation of the best available approaches to crop improvement. I hope we will get over the irrational fears before the increased population and the increased per capita demand for high input foods (beef) overwhelm our productive capacity and increase hunger. JAD

From an Economist Special Report on the Carbon Economy

"Seven years ago the Natural Resources Defence Council and Ecos Consulting, an energy consultancy, got manufacturers, power utilities and the state and federal governments together to talk about shifting to integrated circuits. It took two years to get regulations in place in America. Once adopted in the world’s biggest market, integrated-circuit adaptors spread swiftly everywhere, because manufacturers cannot afford to make things that cannot be sold in America.

"For consumers the switch has meant lower power bills and smaller, lighter power adaptors. For the world as a whole it has meant a drop in global power consumption worth around $2 billion a year—saving 13m tonnes of CO₂ annually worldwide, the equivalent of closing down eight coal-fired power stations."

Comment: How annoying that manufacturers would not have provided the more energy and cost efficient technology simply because there was no explicit demand for it! JAD

A thought about Justice

I have been watching Michael Sandel's televised sessions of his Harvard class titled "Justice". He is obviously a great teacher, able to get students to focus seriously on ethical choices and then bring in the ways that great philosophers of the past had dealt with those issues.

While watching I kept wishing that the instruction was more informed by modern cognitive science research. Clearly our ethics is based on elements of "human nature" such as the ability to relate to the feelings of others, the preference for fairness, and the strong attachment to family and community. The ethics of smart tigers or smart alligators would be different from our ethics because tiger and alligator natures are different than ours.

Sandel recommends the process of going back and forth between ones feelings about the right thing to do and analysis of the principles involved as informed by the great philosophers of the past. That seems a great idea, but as we learn more and more about the biological basis of those feelings, that scientific knowledge too should inform ethical decision making. We are what we have evolved to be, and our ethics should reflect that evolutionary reality.

A Thought About the Civil War

Robert E. Lee failed twice in efforts to bring the Civil War to the northern states, both times after very successful campaigns in Virginia. The first attempt was blocked by federalUnion troops led by McClellan at the battle of Antietam, and the second attempt was blocked by troops led by Meade at the battle of Gettysburg. In both cases Lincoln and his Secretary of War wanted the Union troops after the battle to follow the retreating Confederates rapidly and engage, and in both cases the commanding general did so more slowly and cautiously than the civilians wanted.

One wonders whether the Union generals were right in their caution. In both cases they had relatively unformed armies that had been bloodied by historically unprecedentedly fierce battles. Moreover, it is one thing to halt the aggression of an army invading your own territory and quite another thing to go into the territory of the other army and fight on its home terrain.

McClellan and Meade get a lot of bad press for their caution, but they may have been right.

How Can We Support the Use of Systematic Reviews in Policymaking?

Citation: Lavis JN (2009) How Can We Support the Use of Systematic Reviews in Policymaking? PLoS Med 6(11): e1000141. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000141

Summary Points

Policymakers need many types of research evidence—synthesized and packaged for them—and the use of this evidence supported in multiple complementary ways. Stakeholders who seek to influence the policymaking process have the same requirements.

Policymakers and stakeholders need many types of systematic reviews. For example, reviews of qualitative studies can help to identify alternative framings of the problem, to understand how or why a policy or program option works, and to appreciate stakeholders' perspectives on particular options.

Policymakers and stakeholders now have access to many review-derived products: (1) summaries of systematic reviews highlighting decision-relevant information; (2) overviews of systematic reviews providing a “map” of the policy questions addressed by systematic reviews and the insights derived from them; and (3) policy briefs drawing on many systematic reviews to characterize a problem, policy or program options to address the problem, and implementation strategies.

A range of activities are being undertaken to support the use of reviews and review-derived products in policymaking, all of which warrant rigorous evaluation.

Future challenges include: (1) examining whether and when any apparent duplication of efforts occurs in the production of review-derived products at the international level; and (2) scaling up activities that are found to be effective in supporting the use of reviews and review-derived products in policymaking.