Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

Terrific post by Giulio Quaggiotto at the World Bank PSD blog on the trend towards more publication of data, rather than or as well as information and analysis (and as well as spin).  The key point is that organisations (such as government donors and international institutions) should focus on getting the data out there, rather than trying to intermediate it for their users.  Giulio says:

If resources are limited, focus your efforts on making your data open rather than in producing generic “lessons learned” documents (or other knowledge management products) that have little contextual value for practitioners on the ground. In a world where SMS makes it possible to connect with affected communities even in rural areas, those products will sound increasingly hollow.

In our work on aid transparency, we’ve heard a lot of staff of aid agencies insist that aid agencies have to package the data, otherwise it will be no use to anyone.  The charitable interpretation is that they want to make sure that information is useful; less positively, this impulse may come from the desire to avoid difficult questions that may arise from the raw data.

There is an excellent slide show by Chris Taggart at countculture on this latter point: the risk that open data will lead to the exposure of problems and to difficult questions being asked.

I do not have a problem with public authorities using data to present information and analysis that they think is useful and which will help build their reputation.  But they should publish the raw, underlying data as well.  Any services which they provide to information consumers – such as websites – should use the same data, and the same public access interface, as is available to everyone else.  So if someone else wants to set up a different website, telling the story in a different way or mixing it up with data from another source, they can do so.  There is no reason why the authorities should have privileged access to the data: it should be a common, universally accessible layer on which anyone can build their service or tell their story.

There is a particular challenge in publishing foreign assistance: the consumers of information want information from many different donor agencies and international organisations.  In most cases, citizens in developing countries don’t want to know what a particular organisation is up to everywhere; they want to know what all organisations are up to in a particular place or on a particular topic.  So information intermediaries serving these users need some way to pull together data from many different sources, and turn it into a single stream of comparable, consistent and coherent data.  To a large extent information intermediaries could  do this automatically, if the organisations publish enough detail about their activities to enable the data to be compared; but to some extent it requires that data is deliberately classified and structured to enable this kind of mash up.   A good example is the ability to trace aid from one organisation to another: a lot of aid passes through many organisations before it arrives at its intended beneficiary, and even if every organisation is transparent about all its spending, there is no direct way to track the aid through this chain.  That would need an agreed way of tagging the data so that we can all see how money flows through the system.

So for me, the key messages are:

a. publish the raw data, either instead of or alongside the information and analysis (and sometimes spin)

b. to the extent necessary, agree a minimal set of standards for the way the data are structured and the detail it contains to enable users easily to mix and mash the data so that they can use it. The International Aid Transparency Initiative has the potential to do this.

c.  Aid agencies should not feel that they themselves have to meet the needs of information consumers; they should provide financial support to information intermediaries who will access this data, mix it with other data, and provide locally useful and relevant information which meet a wide range of needs.   The more the donors make detailed, raw data easily available in a consistent format, the less financial support they will need to provide to information intermediaries enable them to use it.

<geek stuff>

Obviously I don’t use Internet Explorer because it is (a) not compliant with standards; (b) not safe; (c) Microsoft.  And I don’t use Safari because Steve Jobs is a control freak and I don’t wish to be locked up in his world.

So like most geeks I’ve been using Firefox, which is faster and safer than Internet Explorer and has great add-ons. But I’m finding Firefox is becoming a little sluggish as it gets more bloated, and perhaps it is becoming a little unstable. For the time being  I have now switched my default browser to Google Chrome, because it is quite a bit faster than Firefox. (I’m writing this in a Chrome, for example).  I’m keeping Firefox because I like some of the plugins (such as S3Fox and Scribefire) but I reckon I’ll only use it when I need one of those.

But, I hear you cry, what a pain switching between different browsers!  It means your bookmarks and logins are never in one place, and they are never there when you want them. Well that is where Xmarks comes in.  This nifty add-on which is available for Firefox and Chrome (and indeed IE and Safari, if you like that kind of thing) synchronises your bookmarks to a central server on the interwebby.  (Securely, we hope.) Once you have installed Xmarks in your various browsers you can forget about it.  Whenever you bookmark something in one browser, that bookmark will appear the same everywhere.  (Ditto stored passwords, if you want.) So whether I am using my home computer, my work laptop or my Linux server, and whether I am using Chrome or Firefox, my bookmarks and logins are all the same in every broswer without me having to copy them over.  Which is nice.  Even if you don’t use more than one browser, Xmarks is pretty handy if you use more than one computer.

</geek stuff />

Peter Mandelson has not thought this through:

First, taking something for nothing, without permission, and with no compensation for the person who created and owns it, is wrong. Simple as that.

With respect, it is not as simple as that.

The reason this looks plausible is the use of the word “taking”.   If I take something from you, that implies that I now have it and you no longer do.  If it was yours to start with, that would be unfair (or, in Mr Mandelson’s word, “wrong”).  But the challenge for making good policy about intellectual property is that the goods in question are non rival – meaning that one person’s consumption does not come at the expense of another person’s consumption of the same good.  If I make a copy of a song and listen to it on my MP3 player, that in no way reduces your ability to listen to it.   So I have not “taken” it from you.  We can both listen to it.  The marginal cost to society of my listening to the song is zero.

Mr Mandelson may have meant by “take” the idea that if I neglect to pay you for something, you lose out.  But this isn’t necessarily wrong.  As Chris Dillow points out, if I give a lift to a friend, I deprive a taxi company of revenue.  The taxi company might not be very happy about that. They might lobby the Business Minister over cocktails on a yacht, requesting that taxi companies be given a monopoly on giving rides in the area they serve.  (After all, they have spent a lot of money on cars and offices.)  The Business Minister should tell them to get stuffed.   There is no basic right to make money on your investments, and being deprived of potential revenue is not the same thing as a cost.

As I explained in more detail here, the economics of non-rival goods is quite different from the other kinds of goods.   Intellectual property rights are a social construct to create temporary monopolies which, unlike other forms of property, worsen rather than increase static allocative efficiency.  For non-rival goods, allocative efficiency requires that the price is zero, but dynamic efficiency may require some sort of remuneration for the creators of the products.  A society may choose to restrict access to a product as a way to create financial incentives for innovation. This may be worth doing if the welfare gains from the incentives to innovate exceed the welfare costs of reducing access to the products.  But that trade-off does not automatically and necessarily come down in favour of having intellectual property rights, nor is the creation of intellectual property rights the only or the necessarily the best way to create incentives to innovate.

This is not a wholesale argument against intellectual property rights.  But it is an argument against the daft claim that intellectual property rights are just the same as rights to rival goods such as physical property.   Property rights for rival goods increase, or at any rate do not diminish, allocative efficiency and hence welfare;  property rights for non-rival goods decrease allocative efficiency, and that is a welfare loss that has to be justified by a welfare gain elsewhere.

We do need to reward and incentivize innovation and creativity appropriately.  But I am struck by the lack of imagination and innovation in the current debate about how we do it.  Intellectual property rights are one approach, but they have important drawbacks.  We should not forget other possible approaches – such as prizes, buy-outs, or public funding – which might secure many of the same benefits without the costs.

A friend visiting from the UK brought a CD-ROM with the new version of Ubuntu Linux.  Those of you with better bandwidth than we have got in Ethiopia (which would be pretty much everyone) can download it here. And another friend brought over a 1TB hard disk (that is 1,000 Gb) for my Shuttle XPC computer.

So I fitted the hard disk (which took about 30 seconds), stuck the Ubuntu CD in the drive, and the install was going nicely until about 54% of the way through, when I got this error message :

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This particular error is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

I tried again; tried a different copy of the install CD (my friend had helpfully brought two copies); and tried installing from the Live CD.  Nothing worked.   So, on a hunch, I tried removing all but one of the RAM sticks in my PC (I have 4GB of RAM).  With only one RAM stick, the install worked perfectly.  I then reinstalled the RAM and rebooted.

I then followed these instructions to install additional software that I wanted.

First impressions: I much prefer the look and feel of Ubuntu to Windows.  I enjoy the combination of simplicity and ease of use, with the knowledge that there is power under the hood to do what I want.   I am in complete control, with no digital rights management restrictions trying to stop me from doing what I want.

Ubuntu is normally very easy to install and use. It is disappointing that there seems to be a problem with the installation programme for Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 – I guess a lot of people would be put off by having to remove the memory chips from their PC, so I hope it is fixed soon.

Because I now have two hard disks, I’ve kept the old version (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn) on the old disk for now.   Ubuntu is smart enough to configure my PC to give me an option at boot time to decide which version I want to use.  So I can easily go back if there is something I don’t like in the new version.

I have a Speedtouch 780 router.  Inside my network is a computer that acts as a media server within the house, and as a mail server (which I use for my personal email) for outside the house.   Until now, I have not been able to access the web server from within the house using the external domain name – that gave me the Speedtouch's own configuration webserver. I had to use the local IP address, or the hostname of the computer.  It also meant that I had to change the server name in my mail client (Thunderbird) depending on whether I was inside or outside the house.

I have found the solution.  I needed an option called NAT Loopback which is apparently only available through the command line interface, not the web interface.   From a Windows (or, in my case, Linux) command line, you need to telnet to the router. Then enter:ip config natloopback=enabled
saveall

I did not need to reboot.

Hat tip: Matt Buckett

I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database.

Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register. 

So far so good.  There is one protection, however, that the government has not yet been persuaded to implement. Each citizen should be able to log in, see their own information, and see the names and job titles of every government official who has accessed that data. 

Sebastian Mallaby writes in the Washington Post highlighting the possible gains to developing countries of a relaxation in the migration policies of rich countries.

In ” Let Their People Come ,” a new book published by the Center for Global Development, Lant Pritchett reports that if rich countries permitted extra immigration equivalent to 3 percent of their labor force, the citizens of poor countries would gain about $300 billion a year. That’s three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all remaining trade barriers, four times more than the foreign aid given by governments and 100 times more than the value of debt relief.

Quite so.  Development assistance is only a small part of what developed nations can, and should, do to reduce global poverty.

Hat tip: Pienso. More from Arnold Kling.

Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute writes:

Over the past couple of years there has been a growing consensus that conditionality does not work.  … It has failed because imposing good policies on countries that don’t want to do them just results in countries taking the cash and then not doing the agreed policies. … Instead of conditionality, the approach should be to set minimum levels of governance and anti-corruption that countries must attain before receiving budgetary support – those countries are likely to absorb the money well and pursue good policies, thereby not needing the conditionality.

This is exactly right. (It is also what I argued in a presentation I gave in a meeting at the Africa Centre in December 2001, what the British Government set out in its policy paper of March 2005, and which I described at greater length here in December 2005.)

Alex goes on: 

DFID currently pays lip-service to governance, but in practice just writes the cheque. In countries where money is likely to be misspent by government, that is a mistake. Instead money should be spent through local, domestic NGOs, and through other bottom-up mechanisms like aid vouchers.

I don't agree at all that DFID only pays lip-service to governance.  DFID has just published an entire White Paper about Making Governance Work for the Poor.   It has recently reallocated its aid in both Uganda and Ethiopia in response to concerns about governance.  That is why DFID refuses to give budget support in countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. 

Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today:

To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.

Quite so.  But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.

Fascinating article by Alan Beattie (registration required) on what he says are five common myths of world trade:

1. "Ghana is allowed to sell raw cocoa beans to the European Union, but if it exports finished chocolate it gets hit by big tariffs."

2. "Each European Union cow gets $2.40 a day in subsidies, more than what 1bn people each have to live on."

3. "The World Trade Organisation is undemocratic and secretive.

4. "No economy ever got rich without using tariffs to industrialise."

5. "Cutting rich countries' farm subsidies and tariffs will be a big boost for the world's poorest."

Read the rest of this entry »

According to BBC news the government’s clamp-down on junk food in schools has led to a black market in the playground:

Ring leaders are buying bars of chocolate and packets of crisps in bulk, and making small profits by surreptitiously selling on to sugar-craving classmates.

Even if the school started selling these things again, we’d still buy from these boys as they’re not so expensive 16-year-old school girl  "You can get a good deal from the boys selling sweets," says a 16-year-old pupil at a respectable comprehensive in south London. "They sell them cheaper than the tuck shop used to."

She claims that three boys in her year are selling junk food to fellow pupils. And it seems that they are cartelising the market: one boy sells crisps, another chocolate, and the third sweets – "chewy sweets and hard sweets and things like that," says the pupil, who asked not to be identified.

"Our school has a healthy eating policy, so the shop and the canteen stopped selling crisps and things. Not long after, these three boys kind of took things over. Now we all know where to go if we want something like that to eat."

You shouldn’t laugh, really – selling sugar to kids is no funnier than selling other addictive and harmful drugs to vulnerable people.   But it is encouraging to hear that an entrpreneurial spirit is flourishing among the British youth.

After all, what are schools for if they don’t teach economics? In today’s lesson, we have learned that markets will generally find a way to close an artificially-created gap between supply and demand; and Government regulations rarely have the effects that the policy-maker intended.

I’ve got a piece up on the CGD blog about a new evaluation of budget support, which finds that budget support helps to improve capacity for financial management and accountability in developing countries. 

I’ve been a long-time advocate of budget support, as I think it is a very important way to reduce some of the possible negative impacts of aid, such as undermining the systems of recipient governments, and reducing their accountability. It is good that the anecdotal evidence on which the policy is based has been backed up by this more comprehensive, rigorous and independent review.

I’m a bit surprised by the OECD press release about the evaluation (pdf) which is much more nuanced about the findings than the evaluation report itself (5Mb pdf here).

Hilary Benn, the UK development minister, was more effusive:

Mr Benn said Britain provided 25% of its aid directly to governments and, in addition to boosting health and education spending, there had been better management of public finances, greater transparency and more effective coordination between donors. …

The development secretary said he reserved the right to stop donating to  governments that failed to meet expected standards of governance and human rights. Britain has cut off aid to Ethiopia and Uganda over alleged human rights abuses, and in Zimbabwe the UK is
prepared to back only specific projects, such as HIV/Aids assistance.

See also the BBC report here.

This caught my eye in the Number 10 morning press briefing from 4 May 2006

Asked if the Prime Minister had sanctioned a peerage to Peter Law, the PMOS said that it was not only a party matter, but also, as people knew, the PMOS did not talk about the nomination process for the House of Lords.

The House of Lords are our legislators, for chrissake. They make our laws. And the official spokesman of the person who chooses them is not allowed to talk about the process for putting them there?

Please tell me that the following are not controversial:

• courts, not civil servants or politicians, should determine what punishment a criminal deserves, based on the individual circumstances of the crime;
• foreigners should be punished no more harshly, and no less, than a UK citizen. 

I think it is downright racist to have a policy of imposing a punishment on foreigners that is harsher than you would impose on UK citizens in the same circumstances.

It is worrying that the Home Office was unable to carry out its policy of deporting foreigners after their release.   But moving to a policy of deporting all foreigners, irrespective of whether that was the punishment imposed by the sentencing judge, would be the biggest over-reaction since the Dangerous Dogs Act. 

Update: Bondwoman at The Sharpener is spot on about this.

I am not one of those who believe the World Bank should be shut down.  Indeed, if anything, I would prefer to see the multiplicity of bilateral aid agencies and NGOs shut down, and all the money put through a single world institution instead.    The World Bank is far from perfect; but it is an absolutely vital part of the fight against global poverty.

One problem with the World Bank is that decisions continue to be made on the basis of "one dollar one vote", reflecting the continuing pretense that it is nothing more than a lending insitution owned by its shareholders, rather than the strategic international institution that it is.

Over on the Center for Global Development blog (CGD is my employer), Ngaire Woods makes a very interesting proposal for the reform of the governance of the World Bank.

… for about 174 members of the Bank, there is little incentive to engage in decisions being made by the Board. Eight Directors can marshal a majority among themselves with little if any consultation with others.

This does not have to be the case. If Directors had to marshal not just 50% of votes (which might be just 8 members), but also 50% of members (92 countries) to make decisions, there would be a clear incentive for to consult and bring on board Directors who represent a large number of countries but wield few votes (such as the two Directors who represent over twenty African countries each yet each wield less than 3.5% of voting power).

This is not a difficult reform. The Bank’s Articles already provide for double-majority voting (Article VIII) for any amendment to the Articles. This could be extended to other decisions. Along with transparency of the Board’s process such as publication of the full minutes of any Board meeting so that countries can read exactly what their Director has said in Board meetings, would be first steps towards a more effective Board.

This seems to me a splendid proposal.  We also need to stop the board from micromanaging every decision taken by the World Bank, focusing instead on strategic direction – perhaps a change like that would help to force the Board to move more "upstream" in its deliberations? 

NB: I’ve disallowed comments on this post here: if you agree (or not), visit the CGD blog and comment there.

Tim Worstall’s weekly roundup
of the best of British Blogs is up.

I have just caught up with this very interesting paper by Rod Boothby looking at the way that new web technology will affect knowledge workers.

Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have one thing in common – they are all push work flows. In other words, they interrupt what you are doing. Theoretically, people can ignore all three, but generally, socially, it is difficult to get away with ignoring all three when you are at the office. Web Office will change that. With Web Office, knowledge workers can pull the information they need when they need it. They can use directories to go straight to the right People Page or Project Page. If that doesn’t work, they can use enterprise search tools. Knowledge workers can also post information, and know that their colleagues will find it when they need it. Gone is the need to blast out an email to everyone in a large group, providing them with information they might need in the future. My colleague, Dan Hoover, puts it this way: “Web Office replaces the current manual processes of reacting to emails, and organizing emails with a system that lets the computer do the filtering and organizing for you.”

There is a revolutionary change going on here.  The kids graduating from college today regard email as my generation regarded carbon paper: it is their parents’ technology. The new generation uses instant messaging, MySpace, and wikis, not email and read-only websites.

As a manager, everything I have been taught, and everything I have learned on the job, has been about the management of people in an office – sharing information in meetings, with back to office reports, exchanging comments on draft papers, implementing central systems.  But the office of the 21st century will be different: staff will work flexibly, from home or on the road, maintaining shared knowledge for others to access as they need it.  We have not begun to understand how to organise and manage the enterprises of the future.

So it turns out that one of the many things that is done for us that we would rather not think about is testing our drugs.

The terrible story of six men who suffered severe complications in the trial of TGN1412 should make us pause to ask how we choose which of us will test new drugs.

The media have coyly referred to the men as "volunteers". In one sense they are: industry guidelines require that trials should not be advertised as a way to make a living, and that payment for testing can only for the time and inconvenience it caused.  But they are not really "volunteers" because that they take part for money.  Drugs are tested mainly students and the unemployed, who are paid between £120 and £150 a day. In an interview on the World at One on Wednesday, one such ‘volunteer’ said that he took part because testing drugs was an easy way to earn money.  (Why else would they do it?)

More than 100,000 people take part in clinical trials every year in the UK.  The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), which reviews the testing of the drug on animals and in laboratories and the conditions of any human trial, say that 1,100 clinical trials are currently under way in Britain, involving between 10 and 120 patients. Of those, 284 are phase one trials, the riskiest stage and the first testing on humans, typically involving healthy subjects.

While I am opposed to unnecessary testing on animals, I am in favour of testing drugs on animals first before they are tried in humans, if the scientists believe that this will help to reduce the risks to people when the drugs are eventually tested in humans. But eventually we do have to test new drugs in humans.  The question then arises: who should those people be? 

This is a case in which we need some people in a society to make a sacrifice, by taking a risk that can be detrimental to their health and sometimes fatal, for a broader public benefit.  

One option is to offer payments sufficient to induce people to take part in the trials.  My inner economist has no problem with paying other people to take risks that we would rather not take ourselves.  In one sense no different than paying people to fight wars or to go down coal mines.   But drug testing is not a profession that requires training and experience.  Nor is it particularly inconvenient.  I could not be an effective fire fighter without proper training, and that would be a career.  But any of us at random could test a drug.  The egalitarian in me feels very uncomfortable with the notion that we should rely on the poor being so hard-up that they are willing to risk discomfort, their future health and perhaps their lives to test a drug that, on average, they will never need themselves.  Unlike fire-fighters, the only reason it is them, and not us, taking this risk is that they need the money more than we do.

In principle, an alternative approach would be to make drug testing like jury service, based on random selection of citizens. You would receive a message in a brown envelope:  "You have been randomly selected to test a new drug.  Please present yourself to Northwick Park Hospital at 9am on Monday morning."    True, this would require people to make a sacrifice that they would probably rather not make, but such are the costs that somebody has to bear for the tremendous benefits of new drugs.  Why should it not be you, from time to time?  (There might be an opt-out: I have decided not to take part in this trial, and recognise that this means that I will not be permitted to use any pharmaceutical product that I may need in the future.)

If we do think that it is acceptable to allow people to sell their bodies to medical science to test our drugs because we don’t want the burden to fall on society through random ballots, then we should have the courage of our convictions:

• the ABPI guidelines which limit the payments that can be made in drugs trials are hypocrisy verging on market fixing.  If we are going to pay people to take part in trials, we should at least let them negotiate a decent payment.  It is self-delusional to pretend they are not doing it for the money.

• we should also allow poor people to rent out their wombs as surrogate mothers, and to sell body parts such as kidneys or corneas, to people who are willing to pay for them.  There is no logic in saying that people can be paid to risk their lives testing drugs, but not be paid to donate a body part to someone who needs it.

We were all shocked at the suggestion in the recent Oscar-winning film, The Constant Gardener, that pharmaceutical companies might exploit Africans to test new products.  In that case, part of the allegation was that the people being treated as guinea pigs had not given informed consent: nobody is making such a claim about the people in the UK who take part in trials. But it is a difficult line to draw. If we are prepared to let the disadvantaged in our own society take these risks on our behalf, then why not outsource the whole business to people in countries who need the money even more? 

Here is the letter Gus O’Donnell did not write:

(And here is the one he did write.)
 

Interesting article in The Grauniad by Laura Barton who claims that 2005 has seen a decline in the monopoly control of the marketing departments of music companies:

This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the over-processed diet served up by many major labels in favour of something a little more homemade. In the process they have notched up numerous high-profile successes, including Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band and Nizlopi.

It does seem to me broadly right that it is in the interest of songwriters and performers that people should be able to share music, rather as many of us did with cassette tapes many years ago.