Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Welcome to my world:

Fortunately my partner has reality-based beliefs.

The sweetness of the apricots offsets the spiciness of the curry in this dish which I am sure has no connection with India at all.   It is a very quick and easy vegan dish.   I usually serve it with brown rice mixed with fried onions and green peas.  I saw this recipe once about 20 years ago, and I’ve been making it from memory ever since. I have no idea if the way I make it now has any connection with the original recipe. But I thought I should write it down while I can remember it.  (If you don’t want to do the spices you can buy a jar of curry paste.  But they don’t sell those here in Addis Ababa.)

Serves 4.

200g dried apricots
100ml orange juice
400g soaked and cooked (or tinned) chick peas
2 medium onions
2 cloves garlic
3cm ginger
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
1 tsp garam masala

Slice the dried apricots and soak them for an hour in the orange juice.

Dice the onions, and fry them until they go soft. Add the garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, turmeric and cayenne. Fry for 2-3 more minutes.  Add the onion and spice mix to the cooked chick peas.

Pour any surplus juice off the apricots (it is delicious to drink, by the way).  Add the apricots to the chickpeas and onions. Add some water if needed and stir.

Cook on a medium ring for 30 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent the mixture from burning.

As well as rice, consider serving with a fresh raita (yoghurt and diced cucumber).

Guzzling coffee may cut heart disease – health – 16 June 2008 – New Scientist

The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die.

You must read this article by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

In a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Barack Obama has promised to double aid by 2012 if he is elected President:

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity. As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

No commitment to reform the institutions of US Foreign Assistance, however (unlike John Edwards).

So asks Simon Maxwell at ODI. His conclusion is that DFID is pretty good.

In our own work on aid architecture, we asked developing country aid practitioners from 27 countries to rank donors and comment on their strengths and weaknesses. DFID outranked other bilateral and multilateral donors. DFID scored especially highly on efficiency, flexibility, speed of disbursement and alignment with country priorities.

The conclusion to draw from this: ‘don’t panic!’.

Thanks Simon. It is good to have support from such a reputable and independent source.

Just one quibble. Simon says:

Some of these contributions have a whiff about them of competition between DFID and the Foreign Office, which is unfortunate.

That would indeed be unfortunate. I don’t know if there is any Whitehall briefing going on; but if it is, then it all seems to be going one way. There is nothing in the papers to suggest DFID briefing negatively about the FCO. And a good thing too. We are above that kind of thing.

One of the unconscionable practices in international aid is the “mission” – a team of experts from donor countries who fly out to the developing country to supervise the way that aid is used. For large aid projects, these mission teams – sometimes composed of eager but inexperienced development workers – will demand meetings with senior officials from the recipient country government, often including Cabinet-level ministers.

These missions are a major burden on developing countries. Each mission ties up many hours of ministerial and official time. The policies pressed on governments are often contradictory, lack evidence and have little or no legitimacy in local policital processes. That is why donors promised in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness to reduce the burden of missions.

Yet in the 18 months since that declaration there were 11,000 missions to 31 countries surveyed by the OECD – an average of about 350 missions per country per year. Each mission lasts about a week, so on average each country will have about 5 donor missions in country at any one time. This is a huge cost to the scarce administrative capacity of developing countries: costs which are imposed by well-meaning donors but borne by the recipient government.

The costs of missions can be thought of as a negative externality – which suggests that developing countries should adopt the polluter pays principle as a way to control the burden. Using the analogy of cap-and-trade in environmental pollution, developing countries could issue tradable missions permits. Here is how it could work:

• Developing countries would each decide how many donor missions they can absorb in total each year. Suppose that a country decides to accept 50 donor missions a year (a seventh of the number they now receive on average!). The government would then issue 50 tradable missions permits, which they would sell to donors in an online auction.
• Development agencies designing aid programmes that require a donor mission would have to include in their budget the cost of buying one of these permits, either in the auction or in a secondary market. This would mean that the budget of the aid project would include explicitly not only the cost to the donor of providing the resources, but also the cost to the recipient that the project will impose. The donor thus bears the full cost of its decisions.
• Donors would have an incentive to coordinate their programmes and send joint missions, since they could then share the costs of mission permits.
• Donors would also have a financial incentive to decentralize their operations to resident staff, rather than sending missions from HQ.

The key to making this work would be for developing countries to be rigorous in limiting donors’ access to ministers and officials to teams holding a mission permit. There would be strong pressures – including financial – on them to accept an additional meeting without a mission permit. This could be avoided to some extent through the visa regime (visiting staff from donor agencies would have to quote their mission permit number), but to some extent the donors would need to police the system themselves.

In general, it seems to me that many of the challenges in the development industry relate are the consequence of negative externalities of donor decisions. As the number of donors increases, the prospects for solving these problems through coordination and committees seem more and more remote – and we should look instead to decentralized, market-based mechanisms to align incentives to deliver better results.

Many progressives here in the UK have a stereotyped view of US politics (roughly speaking: 'Democrats good, Republicans bad').  These assumptions have been reinforced by negative perceptions of the Bush presidency.  And so there is an assumption that the Democrats are more likely to pursue policies that are good for developing countries, such as increasing foreign assistance, or opening markets.  But that is a one-dimensional view about US politics and American attitudes to foreign assistance .  As Todd Moss shows in an updated note:

Under President George W. Bush U.S. assistance to Africa has sharply increased, reaching $4.2 billion in 2005, nearly four times the level of 2000. This rapid growth is partly a result of a renewed sense that aid can fulfill humanitarian objectives and be a useful foreign policy tool—which helped encourage the creation of two major new aid programs, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But the conventional wisdom says that the party of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton is a better friend to Africa than the GOP. Thus the scale of recent aid—and President Bush’s overall enthusiasm for Africa—caught many aid activists by surprise. 

The Republicans have in the past spent more on aid than the Democrats: Todd estimates that, based on past averages, the success of the Democrats in the mid-terms will cost Africa about $800 million. 

I think we forget the importance of the evangelical movement in the Republican coalition; and that the churches have continued to press for more aid for the developing world.  Furthermore, on trade policy, the Republicans are routinely less protectionist and less mercantilist than the Democrats. 

All of which shows that we should not make simplistic assumptions about politics in other countries.

Michael Gerson was, until last month, George W. Bush's speechwriter. His views are hard to pigeonhole – perhaps compassionate conservative comes closest – (see this profile in the New Yorker): he is strongly religious, anti-choice on abortion, and instinctively in favour of free markets.  But perhaps his defining interest is his passionate belief in the need for the US to increase foreign assistance, for both moral reasons and out of self interest, especially in the battle against infectious disease and against poverty.  He more than anyone else was responsible for persuading President Bush to adopt a $15 billion program to combat HIV and AIDS around the world.  His former colleagues used to refer to him as the conscience of the White House.

So it is interesting to read Michael Gerson being interviewed in Foreign Policy:

The Bush administration has increased foreign assistance at a higher rate than at any time since the Marshall Plan. A lot of that has gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, but a lot of it has gone to fighting AIDS and malaria and to the Millennium Challenge Account. The increases have been dramatic, but the need for more [aid] is even greater. Congress has not always been cooperative in increasing foreign assistance to the levels we need. So I think there’s a need for constant public pressure to make the point that foreign assistance, when it’s done properly, is not an altruistic add-on to American foreign policy. It’s a centerpiece commitment of our national security strategy. It shows our values in the world. We’re different from our Islamist opponents because we believe that everyone has value, or worth, and that worth is not determined by distance or culture.

Europeans tend to assume – wrongly – that Republican administrations are less generous in foreign assistance than Democratic administrations, because in European politics the left are identified with a more internationalist outlook than the right.  That is not true in American politics, not least because of the moral attitude of the religious right who make up an influential part of Republican support.

Let us hope that in his new role in the Council on Foreign Relations, he will continue to press the case – for which there is growing bipartisan support – that foreign assistance is both a centerpiece commitment of national security and a moral duty.

Peter Hitchens in the Mail:

I repeat, I love America, think we have much to learn from her, am endlessly glad that she exists, I like Americans and enjoy many aspects of American culture. My heart always lifts when I arrive there and sinks when I have to leave again. But I do not regard her as a reliable ally of Britain. And why should I expect to? It was the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who pointed out that great powers had "no eternal friends, only eternal interests".

I pointed out last year that, just as the British misunderstand the nature of their friendship with the United States, so too many Americans have a hazy recollection of their role in two world wars. (Having been late for the last two world wards, they seem determined to be on time for the start of the third.)

Britain is still paying our war debt to America. Our final payment is due in December this year: I wonder if there will be a national celebration.

Much of the literature about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of aid revolves around whether aid accelerates economic growth.

But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor.  If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of people who would otherwise go to bed hungry, it might have no lasting or measurable impact on the economy, but the world would be a better place as a result of this redistribution.

A new paper by World Bank economists Francois Borguignon, Victoria Levin and David Rosenblatt looks at the impact of aid on global inequality (ignoring, for these purposes, any dynamic effects on growth).  The paper finds that aid does indeed reduce global inequality; and that while it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by trade barriers imposed by high-income countries.

They make this interesting observation: 

Although this paper is about international inequality, we know that the actual level of global inequality of income is extremely high ­ with a Gini coefficient between 0.64 (Milanovic 2005) and 0.66 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). If this level of inequality were to exist within a single country, that country would probably experience substantial social strife. That this does not happen in the world simply means that, as of today, there is nothing like a global community.

When writers such as Charles Dickens wrote about the lives of the poor in England and other newly industrialised countries, they made it impossible for society to continue tolerate or sustain the inequality and poverty in their midst.  We desperately need that same realisation for the world. 

Hat tip: PSD blog 

Human Rights Watch says that the G8 must act on Darfur:

“For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to tell Khartoum that it has no alternative but to accept the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur.”

Take a look at this BBC photoset to see what life is like in a camp in Darfur.

I have got a blog post up at the Center for Global Development blog, Views from the Center, saying that we have got a long way to go.

A joint project linking the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Global Development presented recommendations for transforming U.S. foreign assistance this morning.  The recommendation is for a new government department for global development, based on the British model for development policy.

(Full disclosure: I am the author of the chapter of the report which describes the British model which the group recommends.)

The book, Security by Other Means, will be published shortly. The near final version is online here.  This from the website for the project:

In a world transformed by globalization and challenged by terrorism, foreign aid has assumed renewed importance as a foreign policy tool. While the results of more than forty years of development assistance show some successes, foreign aid is currently dispersed between many agencies and branches of government in a manner that inhibits formulation and implementation of a coherent, effective strategy.

The current political climate is receptive to a transition toward greater accountability and effectiveness in development aid. Because this transition is clearly an imperative but has not yet been comprehensively addressed, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have conducted a joint study that both assesses the current structures of foreign assistance and makes recommendations for efficient coordination.

Drawing on expertise from the full range of agencies whose policies affect foreign aid, Security by Other Means examines foreign assistance across four categories reflecting the interests that aid furthers: security, economic, humanitarian, and political.

It is irritating to see opponents of abortion seeking to restrict abortion by opportunistically using arguments which they think are superficially persuasive but which bear no relationship to their real views and which they know to be irrelevant.

There are people who believe that a human foetus is a human life with full moral rights and that all abortion is therefore wrong.  That is a coherent point of view, though it is not one that I agree with.  There are those who believe that – at least during the early stages of pregnancy – a foetus does not have characteristics which would confer moral worth sufficient to outweigh the rights of the mother.  That alternative view is also coherent.

What does not make any sense is to say that the moral worth of the foetus depends on whether it is "viable" – that is, whether it could survive outside the womb.  Yet time and again, the abortion debate is argued on this territory.

According to the BBC a Catholic Cardinal has called upon the government to revise the abortion laws on just this basis:

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor argues that technological advances mean the abortion laws are outdated. Modern medicine can now ensure the survival of some foetuses born before 24 weeks gestation.

This does not make any sense.  If we should attach moral worth to a foetus, it is because of the characteristics it has (e.g because it feels pain or because God has infused it with a soul) or because we attach value to what it has the potential to become.  Whether or not a foetus has moral worth cannot possibly depend on whether scientists have yet developed an effective artificial incubator.   Whether or not a foetus is a bearer of rights does not change over time with scientific progress, nor does it vary between countries according to the state of the health care system.  (Whether or not those rights will in practice be recognized may well depend on these factors.)

Linking the rights of the foetuses to viability is not only sloppy thinking, it is cynical opportunism on the part of the anti-abortionists.  They know that one day in the not too distant future it will be possible for a human egg to be fertilized in vitro and incubated entirely in an artificial womb.  That means that all embryos will be "viable" from the moment of fertilization (it also means that a freezer full of egg and sperm will be "viable" but we will leave that aside).   By linking the moral value of the foetus to viability, they are hoping to make it easier to criminalize all abortions one day. 

We are being asked to abdicate the important moral judgement (what characteristics are sufficient for a living object to have rights that would compete with the rights of the mother?) by asking a different, empirical question (how likely is it that a foetus will survive outside the womb?).  For example, on the BBC's Any Questions this week, Sir Mark Tully (a journalist who is a Christian) said:

I also think that of course it is very important that we do consider the scientific evidence of this as to what actually we are doing when we abort a child, when we reach the stage when really that is that child is beyond any doubt a living being …

I think this is something which has to be left to science very much. I think if people like us or indeed religious leaders or anyone who is an amateur starts actually speculating about that question it's very dangerous indeed.  [my emphasis]

This is clearly nonsense.  Scientists can tell us the probability that a particular foetus might survive outside the womb, or at what stage a foetus is likely to be able to feel pain.  But they are in no better position than anyone else ("amateurs") to form a view about which of these characteristics ought to be regarded as determining the moral worth of the foetus.

Those who oppose abortion should stand their ground on a meaningful claim about the characteristics of the foetus.  If you take the religious view that a foetus has rights because it has been unobservably infused by a transcendental soul at the moment of conception, then say so.   If you believe that the foetus has some other characteristic that give it a moral claim – such as the ability to feel pain, or consciousness – then let's hear what these characteristics are and we can consider together whether we find it persuasive that having those characteristics is a sufficient basis to trump the rights of the mother. 

The religious fundamentalists know that they won't win the argument by saying that a foetus has moral rights because God has entered its soul at conception.   So they try to sidestep the question about what characteristics are significant in determining moral worth by pretending that it matters whether a foetus could survive outside the womb.  That is not the point, and they know it.

The International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill will today be voted on for its third reading by the House of Commons.  The bill requires the government to produce an annual report assessing progress toward the 0.7% target, the UN's millennium goals and the effectiveness of aid.

As the second-reading debate showed, there is considerable support for this bill on both sides of the House. 

Update: the Bill passed the House of Commons unanimously. 

Here is me on my morning run in Boulder yesterday. This is at the top of Bear Peak, from which there are great views over the Rockies.

Unfortunately I lost Grethe’s phone somewhere down the trail coming down. But the views were definitely worth the cost of replacing it.

I installed the lastest version of SUSE Linux on my home computer last weekend. 

Linux is a free alternative to Windows.  For technically-minded people, it can be more powerful, safer and much cheaper to use than Windows.  It is now widely used by businesses for servers (most webservers run on Linux).  Easy-to-use desktop versions have been slower to emerge, partly because many of the geeks who contribute their time (free) to write, debug, improve and document Linux have not always given a high priority to developing an easy user interface.

If you have been using Firefox web browser (and about 20% of the readers of this blog do) you will know that free, open source software can be considerably more powerful, more reliable, easier to use, and more safe than the proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  And what is true for the web browser is true for the entire operating system.

The latest version of SUSE is a joy to use.  I have Windows XP on my laptop, and I can honestly say that I think SUSE is better desktop operating system.  It comes laden with free software, from music players (without any Digital Rights Management) to a free alternative to Microsoft Office which does the job at least as well (and in some ways better).

Installing and updating Linux on my desktop was quicker and easier than installing and updating Windows XP on my laptop.   Installing Windows required me to update the driver for my laptop’s sound card so that I could update successfully to Service Pack 2; install SP2 (which takes an hour or more); and then uninstall various Windows services that I do not need to secure my laptop.  SUSE Linux, by contrast, recognised all my hardware automatically, installed all the correct drivers, and updated itself online in 20 minutes.

I’ve made some notes here about the installation, mainly relating to ensuring that the computer correctly handles multimedia (such as MP3 files and commercial DVDs). 

In addition, I have set up my own IMAP mail server at home.  This is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I now have a commercial strength, secure mail server) and is quite involved (just as it would be in Windows).  But it is also rewarding, as it gives me a very powerful and easy to use central mail system which I can access in many different ways.    Full details here. 

Ethan Zuckerman comments on the lack of media interest (either mainstream or online) in the continuing conlicts in Darfur and in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He also reports the study in the Lancet of the number of deaths in the DRC, which I reported on Friday.

It is shameful that, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Kristof, these unfolding disasters have had almost no media attention.
 

According to a study in this week’s Lancet, nearly 4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a result of the conflict which began in 1998.

Richard Brennan et al report the findings of a nationwide household mortality survey conducted between April and July, 2004.   The national crude mortality rate of 2.1 deaths per 1000 per month was 40% higher than the sub-Saharan regional level – about 38,000 excess deaths per month.   The total death toll from the conflict (1998-2004) was estimated to be 3.9 million.

To put that in perspective, twice as many people die preventable deaths each year in the Congo as died in the Asian Tsunami last year.

The proximate cause of the vast majority of these additional deaths is infectious diseases which could be easily prevented or treated, if security and humanitarian assistance were provided.

Dr Brennan comments:

"This is the fourth in a series of surveys since 2000 that have consistently drawn the same conclusion-Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. It is a sad indictment on us all that, seven years into this crisis, ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal, and that international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need. Major governments, the United Nations, the African Union, humanitarian agencies, and the international media must all play a role: improved security is essential to lower the death toll; greater political engagement is urgently required; the parties to the conflict must be held to account; and the level of humanitarian aid must be increased dramatically. The citizens of DR Congo must finally be given the chance to live their lives in peace and security, and to achieve their full potential".

On these figures, the conflict in the DRC has now taken more lives than any since the Second World War.

The rich countries could, with pitifully little effort, step in to prevent further conflict, provide security for the people of DRC, and provide the essential humanitarian support needed to end this slaughter.  But we won’t.