Israel Lobby and NAFTA?

Successive...administrations have used AIPAC’s power on the Hill, not only for the sake of Israel aid, but for Egypt’s aid, for Jordon’s aid, for aid to the Palestinians, the Palestinian authority, the people are for the whole foreign aid budget would not pass without AIPAC’s influence.

The whole free trade agreement process was started with the US- Israel free trade agreement. Why? Because that was the only way the ...., now we’re talking about the Regan administration could get it through Congress was with AIPAC’s help.

And once they established the free trade agreement with Israel it became possible to get free trade agreements and that was the precursor to NAFTA and so on.

-Martin Indyk

An interesting and a highly charged debate on the influence of Israel Lobby hosted by the London Review of Books in NY, (here's the transcript-very highly recommended)

Related;
The Israel lobby debate
Lawmakers Approve $2.4 Billion in Military Aid to Israel

Israel Lobby Watch (Palestinian source)
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Wikipedia)

Israel's Influence
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

Israel Lobby (Dutch Documentary)
Paper on Israel Lobby Sparks Heated Debate

Walt and Mearsheimer on "The Israel Lobby"
Council on American-Islamic Relations News Conference on Israeli Influence
AIPAC, Iran, and the two Abdullahs

The War over Israel’s Influence

Podcasts

How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City


Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present

AAA ratings on rates

Albert Speer

The Centenary of the Modernist Crisis
This week marks the centenary of the publication of Pope Pius X's reactionary encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, in which he announced that 'Modernism' (a term he invented) was the synthesis of all heresies.

Metaphysics Down Under

Economic history with Gregory Clark

Shakespeare Authorship Doubters Club

If want to join, sign the Declaration

Members include;Mark Twain/ Henry James/ Walt Whitman/ Charles Dickens/ Ralph Waldo Emerson/ Sigmund Freud

You Tube Thought of the Day

Larry Summers speech at UC San Diego

Also highly recommended the following interview with Summers;

The Idea that is America

A very moving letter on the need for upholding the values we believe in (emphasis mine);

Dear Senator McCain:

I am a graduate of West Point currently serving as a Captain in the U.S. Army Infantry. I have served two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, one each in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. On 7 May 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's testimony that the United States followed the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the "spirit" of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan prompted me to begin an approach for clarification. For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General's office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men.

Instead of resolving my concerns, the approach for clarification process leaves me deeply troubled. Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.

That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about it now. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion. My approach for clarification provides clear evidence that confusion over standards was a major contributor to the prisoner abuse. We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.

Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Others argue that clear standards will limit the President's ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.

Both of these arguments stem from the larger question, the most important question that this generation will answer. Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is "America."

Once again, I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.

With the Utmost Respect,

-- Capt. Ian Fishback

Can America be a humble nation?

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Colbert Report

Related;
Interview with Fareed Zakaria

Artist of the Day- Chris Jordan

Some of Chris Jordan's photographic arts (from the series In Katrina's Wake) ;




Related;
Bringing Big Numbers Down to Size

Some Amazing Children's Yoga

Ross Emmett's Teaching Philosophy

Somebody I wish I had as a teacher-his teaching philosophy below;

Rabbi Hayim of Tsanz used to tell this parable. A man wandering lost in the forest for several days, finally encountered another. He called out: "Brother, show me the way out of this forest!" The man replied: "Brother, I too am lost. I can only tell you this: The ways I have tried lead nowhere; they have only led me astray. Take my hand and let us search for the way together." And Rabbi Chayim would add: "So it is with us. When we go our separate ways, we may go astray; let us join hands and look for the way together."

Professor Emmett's blog.

The story of Kerala

Interesting article on the Indian State of Kerala;

To its admirers, the state’s struggles are those endemic to the developing world, while its achievements are unique. It is poor, even by India’s standards, with an annual per capita income of $675, compared with $730 nationwide. (The figure in the United States is about $25,000.)

But Kerala’s life expectancy is nearly 74 years — 11 years longer than the Indian average and approaching the American average of 77 years. Its literacy rate, 91 percent, compares to an Indian average of 65 percent, and an American rate the United Nations estimates at 99 percent.

Those enviable outcomes, its supporters stress, are a result of policy choices: Kerala spends 36 percent more on education than the average Indian state and 46 percent more on health.

“The fact that quality of life can be improved through government intervention, even in societies that are very poor — I think that’s important,” said Prabhat Patnaik, the vice chairman of the state planning board. Kerala’s experience, he said, shows “the quality of life is not just related to the growth rate” of the economy.

“Put it in the context of any other part of the developing world and its achievements still stand out as remarkable,” said Richard Franke, an anthropologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “Children don’t die in the first year of life, boys and girls have approximately equal life chances, they get educated, and they live long lives.”

He added, “The Kerala model stands as a great achievement, with or without migration.”

Kerala’s culture of human investment is at least two centuries years old and owes early debts to the missionaries and maharajahs who emphasized schools. By the early 20th century, literate Keralites were already migrating internally, to work as clerks in Delhi and Bombay, and sending money home.

Kerala was equally well known as a font of leftist politics. The Communist Party came to power in 1957, a year after statehood, and has ruled on and off since. The state transferred land from the rich to the poor, set a minimum wage and invested heavily in clinics and schools.

Though Kerala’s tax rates have been comparable to other Indian states’, its collection rates have been higher, and it has spent more on education and health.

It also gained a reputation as a place hostile to business, with heavy regulation, militant unions and frequent strikes. There are fishing jobs but little industry and weak agriculture. Government is the largest employer; many people run tenuous businesses like tea shops or tiny stores.

Talk of the Kerala model began after a 1975 United Nations report praised the state’s “impressive advances in the spheres of health and education.” Starved for success stories from the developing world, experts noticed.

Amartya Sen, a future Nobel laureate in economics, wrote widely on Kerala, arguing (in a book with Jean Dreze) that its “outstanding social achievements” were of “far-reaching significance” in other countries. In a book on three places that inspire global hope, Bill McKibben, an American, wrote that “Kerala demonstrates that a low-level economy can create a decent life” and shows that “sharing works.”

Yet even as Kerala gained fame, large numbers of its workers were leaving. The Persian Gulf needed labor, and Keralites were used to traveling for jobs. The number of overseas workers doubled in the 1980s, and then tripled in the 1990s. In a state of 32 million where unemployment approaches 20 percent, one Keralite worker in six now works overseas. The largest number work at taxing construction jobs, outdoors in the Arabian sun, though high literacy allows some Keralites to land office work.

Without migrant earnings, critics say, the state’s luster could not be sustained. The $5 billion that Keralite migrants send home augment the state’s economic output by nearly 25 percent. Migrants’ families are three times as likely as those of nonmigrants to live in superior housing, and about twice as likely to have telephones, refrigerators and cars. Men seeking wives place newspaper ads, describing themselves as “handsome, teetotaler, foreign-employed” or “God-fearing and working in Dubai.”

The Economist reviews Tyler Cowan

TYLER COWEN tugs popular economics in the direction of self-help: how you can use simple insights and intuitions from economic theory to get more of what you want. The dust jacket of his book promises tips on love, work and dentistry, and that's only the start. There are suggestions for improving your reading habits, surviving torture, getting the dishes done at home, collecting fine art, going to the cinema, giving to charity and ordering food when eating out (at an expensive restaurant, “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good”).

If you didn't know that Mr Cowen was an economist, you might take him for a psychologist. The version of economics advanced here has nothing to do with algebra or interest rates. It is economics in Ludwig von Mises's formulation of a “logic of choice”. How do we decide what we want? How do we know what other people want? If we can make a bit of progress on those two fronts, says Mr Cowen, we can probably improve the quality of our everyday life.

One of his recurrent warnings is to allow for the complexities of human emotions. What people want cannot always be expressed in money. You cannot, for example, pay your children to respect you, any more than you might pay your spouse to love you. And even in situations where cash incentives might seem appropriate, you are liable to come up against the general truth that people hate to feel manipulated. A teenage child might balk at washing dishes at home to qualify for pocket money—but would willingly do the same thing in the café down the road, where a job and a wage signalled independence....

Mr Cowen's model for running better meetings is hard to beat: put in place a system (he suggests body sensors) that enables participants to signal their boredom anonymously. When everyone is known to be bored, the meeting halts. It's a pity, however, that Mr Cowen doesn't really arrive at any useful advice for keeping the dentist in line. The problem here, to extend his line of argument, may be that you want a dentist whose supreme value is to avoid inflicting pain; yet who, with that supreme value, would ever become a dentist?

-How to work and play a little better

Early Detection, Early Action

Bird flu has been transmitted from human to human

How Wars will be fought in the 21st Century

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

Related;
Washington Ignores Cyberattack Threats, Putting Us All at Peril;

A decade ago, Chinese military theorists like the infamous colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui were already hinting at the importance of simultaneously striking multiple infrastructure layers in a confrontation with the US. In theory, the breakdown of one system would compound the effects on another, and the crippling of energy, government services, communications, the media, and health care and finance systems would interact in a downward spiral.

Finally, informational dependencies and e-attack methodologies are advancing exponentially; the more complex our society becomes, the greater its inherent vulnerabilities (a law that software writers certainly understand). A digital assault today would outrage and inconvenience Americans, but we'd pull through. Tomorrow could be different. Military technologies and techniques can develop with distressing speed: In 1918, those rickety World War I airplanes were little more than romantic irritants; by 1943, a mere quarter-century later, long-range bombers were flattening entire cities. And the pace of technological change today is considerably greater than it was in the 1920s and 1930s.

The military maxim that applies is that, while you may hope for the best, you had best prepare for the worst (a principle violated, fatally, in Iraq). If the US vigorously pursues offensive and defensive e-war capabilities but the skeptics turn out to be right, we will have wasted only time and money. But if the US doesn't prepare and those who dismiss the digital-warfare threat are wrong, we might face a devastating surprise attack. To borrow a line from Frank Zappa, Pearl Harbor might look like "strictly a pup-tent affair."

A well-prepared, resourceful opponent could create an atmosphere of collapse, as America's most-advanced military systems failed, citizens panicked, and the economy froze. The enemy's goal would be to pressure Washington into an early settlement that amounted to a de facto surrender.

Picture of the Day

"All part of Ibrahim Lukman's new piece of art, called "The Madonna Series," in Frankfurt."

What's Happening in Germany?

IS EASTERN GERMANY SAFE FOR FOREIGNERS?

Germany Wonders How to Stop the Neo-Nazis

Severe Anti-Semitism Hits Youth Football in Germany

Microwave Popcorn or your health?

Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit;

Exposure to synthetic butter in food production and flavoring plants has been linked to hundreds of cases of workers whose lungs have been damaged or destroyed. Diacetyl is found naturally in milk, cheese, butter and other products.

Heated diacetyl becomes a vapor and, when inhaled over a long period of time, seems to lead the small airways in the lungs to become swollen and scarred. Sufferers can breathe in deeply, but they have difficulty exhaling. The severe form of the disease is called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung,” which can be fatal.

Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel

-Israel’s Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial

Related;
A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters;

Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel’s interests coincide with America’s, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries’ interests are opposed.

The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure of it. Working closely with members of Congress, public-policy organizations and journals of opinion, energetic, well-financed groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, along with dozens of political-action committees, perpetuate the myth, as the authors see it, of Israel as an isolated, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies and in need of America’s unstinting financial and military support....

The problem, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, is that Israel has become a strategic liability with the end of the cold war and a moral pariah in its dealings with the Palestinians and, most recently, the Lebanese. Uncritical American support for its closest Middle East ally has damaged American credibility in the Arab world, encouraged terrorism, stymied the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem, and in every way made America’s international position weaker and more dangerous.

Luciano Pavarotti Is Dead

-Luciano Pavarotti, Italian Tenor, Is Dead at 71

Thank God

Terrorist acts are averted in Germany and Denmark

The Age of Riches

-Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity

The Economy in Pictures-Mexico

For Discussion: From charts above can you identify the main macroeconomics and developmental challenges facing Mexico?

Barro the great

A profile of Robert Barro, (in the latest edition of F&D;

Barro's attack on the foundations of Keynesian monetary policy, which was carried out with a group of other prominent macroeconomists, was preceded by an attack on Keynesian fiscal policy and it was carried out single-handedly. The Keynesian view on fiscal policy, again, was one of activism: governmentts should use budget deficits to smooth out fluctuations in private income. When the private economy stalls, governments should attempt to boost private spending by running larger budget deficits, financing these deficits by borrowing rather than by raising taxes.

In a 1974 paper in the Journal of Political Economy, Barro made the case that the choice of financing, whether through borrowing or taxing, did not matter. If the government borrowed to run deficits, people would realize that it would have to raise taxes in the future to pay back what it had borrowed. They would therefore simply raise their savings today to be able to pay back those future taxes. The government's attempts to boost private spending through its own borrowing would thus be nullified. But what if those future taxes were essentially passed on to future generations? Would people today then not feel richer as a result of government borrowing? Not, Barro argued in his paper, if today's generation cared not only about their own spending but about how their children would have to spend. If they cared about their children, they would simply save more to leave them the extra money to pay for the future taxes. Once again, the government's ability to get today's generation to spend more by running budget deficits would be nullified.

The reaction to Barro's argument was one of disbelief. As a 1990 "Schools Brief" in The Economist put it: "The idea of the infinitely forward-looking, altruistic parent seems crazy. At first, even economists struggled not to laugh." But over time, Barro's model became standard, so that even its critics were forced to use it as the starting point for their own models. The Economist concluded that, as a result of the influence of Barro's work, "few expect as much from the active use of fiscal policy as they used to."

The hits keep coming?

Boston University's Robert King, a former colleague of Barro, calls him "the most influential applied macroeconomist of his generation," but tells F&D that this influence stems not from a single contribution but from the fact that "in virtually every major area of the field you have to contend with a paper by Barro."

In recent years, Barro has been working on a possible resolution to a long-standing puzzle in macroeconomics and finance, the so-called equity premium puzzle—a reference to the fact that stocks have historically earned a much larger return than government bonds. Of course, that stocks are riskier than bonds accounts for some of this difference in returns. But the difference is so high that it suggests a degree of risk aversion on the part of investors that economists regard as implausible. Barro argues, however, that rare disasters, such the Great Depression or 9/11, even though they are low-probability events, can keep investor demand for safe assets such as government bonds high relative to that for stocks.

Whether or not this work joins his other papers on the hit parade, there is no doubt that Barro intends to keep on trying. In a 1999 essay in Nothing Is Sacred, he wrote: "I have never really understood the big attraction of going out while still on top," and he wondered why New York Yankees hitter Joe DiMaggio retired in 1951 and why "the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel disbanded while at their best. The main consequence was that the public missed out on many years of fine, even if not the greatest, performance." Barro's many fans will take delight in his implicit promise that, in his case at least, the hits will keep on coming.

Teacher Credentials Don't Matter for Student Achievement

From NBER Digest;

In How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement? (NBER Working Paper No. 12828), co-authors Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor study the effect of teacher credentialing on student achievement using data on 75 percent of all children in North Carolina in grades 3, 4, and 5 from 1994 to 2003. Their results show that having a graduate degree has little effect on student achievement. Teachers who entered teaching with a master's degree, or who earned it within five years of beginning to teach, were as effective as teachers without a master's degree. Teachers who earned a master's degree more than five years after they started teaching were less effective than those without master's degrees.

As in previous studies, the authors find here that teachers with more experience are better teachers. This is the case even after accounting for the fact that the teachers who remain teachers may, on average, be less effective than those who leave. The benefit of experience peaks at 21-27 years of teaching and adds 0.092 to 0.119 standard deviations to student achievement scores. More than half of that gain occurs during the first years of teaching. Teachers who come from competitive undergraduate institutions are somewhat more effective than those who come from uncompetitive colleges or universities, the researchers find.

By comparison, increasing class size by five students reduces math achievement by 0.015 to 0.025 standard deviations, and reading achievement by 0.010 to 0.020 standard deviations. Having a parent with only a high school degree decreases math scores by about 0.11 standard deviations relative to having a parent who has a college degree. Having a parent who is a high school dropout reduces achievement by another 0.11 standard deviations. The effects for reading are slightly larger than for math.

Overall, the authors find that having a math teacher with low scores on the licensing exam, little experience, an undergraduate degree from a noncompetitive college, and an emergency license, is roughly equivalent to having poorly educated parents. This suggests that schools that put teachers with weak credentials into classrooms with educationally disadvantaged children tend to widen the already large achievement gaps associated with various socioeconomic differences.

While the effect of teacher credentials on mathematics achievement for third, fourth, and fifth graders is quite large compared to class size or parental education, the effects on reading achievement are noticeably smaller. Even highly credentialed teachers will likely not offset the effects of educationally impoverished family backgrounds on reading. In view of this, the authors conclude that a "real challenge for policymakers is to find ways to direct the teachers with strong credentials to the students who most need them."

The data used in this study are administrative records; they allow the researchers to link specific teachers with the reading and math performance of specific children, provide substantial information on each child's socioeconomic status, and contain each child's standardized test scores. The records also identify each teacher's license type, licensing exam score, years of experience, undergraduate college or university, and advanced degrees or National Board certification.

Previous work suggests that teachers with stronger credentials tend to end up teaching students who perform better academically. This rich dataset allows the authors to correct for the possibility that, while teachers with better credentials can command better students and thus are associated with high student achievement, the better results may not stem from better teaching.

The authors focus on credentials that can be affected by policy. These include the number of years a teacher has taught, whether a teacher has a regular or an emergency license, whether the teacher has an advanced degree or National Board Certification, his score on the state's licensing exam, and the competitiveness of his undergraduate institution. A student's standardized end-of-grade test scores in reading and math are assumed to be dependent on achievement in the previous year and on student, teacher credentials, and classroom characteristics in the current year.

A You-Tube Course in Basic Economics

From cepr (not necessarily your kind of economics, anyway);

The Basics of Good Economics
Growth I: Why Economists Worry About It So Much, and Why You Should Too
The Long Slide Down and Apart: U.S. Labor Markets

Growth II: Growth in the Developing World Over the Last Quarter Century
Trade: What Are the Gains and Who Gets Them
When Women Get Paid for Work: The Entry of Women to the Paid Labor Market
Horatio Alger is Dead
The Federal Reserve Board: The Most Important Source of Poverty in the U.S.
Financial Bubbles (Stocks and Housing) and How You Can Protect Yourself Against Them
Intellectual Property: Patents, Copyrights and Other Protectionist Barriers

Why we use Maths in Economics

Dani Rodrik says because we are not so smart enough to not to use maths;

So I tell them a story about Sir W. Arthur Lewis. When I was a master's student myself at Princeton, I once attended a lecture that he gave on real wages, the commodity terms of trade, and North-South income differentials. The talk had no math in it. One of the younger faculty members of the economics department was sitting in the front row, and I could see him scratching his head in confusion throughout the talk. A few minutes after Sir Arthur was done, this young professor jumped up in excitement and went up to the board. "Now I get it!" he exclaimed and began to scribble some equations on the board. "This is the equation which relates to what you said in the first part of your talk, and this one expresses the other, and here is a third... and now finally we have three independent equations that determines your three endogenous variables..." Sir Arthur kept on his bemused smile as his lecture was explained to him in mathematical terms.

The moral of the story is that if you are smart enough to be a Nobel-prize winning economist maybe you can do without the math, but the rest of us mere mortals cannot. We need the math to make sure that we think straight--to ensure that our conclusions follow from our premises and that we haven't left loose ends hanging in our argument.

I would highly recommend the following book; W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics by Robert L. Tignor

Related;
The Fall and Rise of Development Economics

You Tube of the Day-Milton Friedman on Charlie Rose

"Blair is a Thatcherite in Policy, Blairite in Talk"
"There will be future Tianamen Squares [in China}"
"We never would have had the Great Depression if there hadn't been a Fed"

Related;
Economic Freedom of the World 2007

Old and New Blogs

Some random and not so random blogs;

Growth Matters

Entertaining Research

Public Economics

Economics Literature

HongKong Macro

The Traveller Within

Econo-ponderables
Ec10 Helpful Hints
Organizations, Management Behavior and Economics
International Corporate Governance

Dan Gilbert Blog

Pandoro

laissez faire

Bonoboland

econotech

iPienso

International Economic Law and Policy Blog

Daniel Antal, Budapest

Central- European Economics Watch

Robust and Significant

Crow Intelligence

Via Mixing Memory

Related;
Birds have shown they can plan for a future state of mind;

The researchers, led by Nicky Clayton of the University of Cambridge, wanted to test an idea proposed by Wolfgang Köhler, Norbert Bischof and Doris Bischof-Köhler, three German psychologists. The Bischof-Köhler hypothesis says that only humans can mentally separate themselves from what they are experiencing to envisage how they might feel about future events.

To test whether this is so, Dr Clayton and her colleagues sought to tease apart scrub-jays' momentary desires from their planning for future needs. They let the birds eat as much of one food as they wanted, exploiting a condition called specific satiety—once the birds are full of one food, they show strong preference for something different. They then offered the birds that same food or a second one to store for later.

Initially the scrub-jays behaved as predicted, choosing to stow away the second food, which they had not just eaten. But minutes before allowing the birds to recover their stash, the researchers fed the birds to satiety with that second food—the one they had already stored. The birds changed their caching preferences on the very next trial. Even though they had just had their fill of the first food, they still cached it, presumably because they thought it would be their preferred choice later. The results are published in this week's Current Biology.

The finding matters because the birds seem to plan ahead for what they will want later, even though their choice conflicts with what they want now. It could prompt a reassessment of how animals perceive the world around them. Without the benefit of experimental subjects who can explain their thinking, however, Dr Clayton and her colleagues will have to develop ever more cunning experiments to infer complex mental processes from simple behaviour.

It takes a thief to know a thief

Some Book recommendations

Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India By Gyanendra Pandey

India After Gandhi-The History of the World's Largest Democracy
By Ramachandra Guha

The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan
by Ayesha Jalal

Related;
The `War on Terrorism`: Where Do We Stand?

Assorted Podcasts

History of Israel

Farewell to Alms

Future Files
Richard Watson is a trend watcher and futurist. He is the founder of nowandnext.com - a website that documents new ideas, trends and innovations from around the world. He is also the CEO of Global Innovation Network, a business think tank that helps organizations to think about the future using a brain bank of 'innocent experts'. His areas of expertise include analyzing trends to create frameworks for innovation and scenario planning.

Islam and Science

Lessons from Wall Street's 'Panic of 1907'

Oscar Wilde

Modern Malaysia

Conservative God: the complex legacy of Ronald Reagan

India and the legacy of Partition
Pakistan and the legacy of Partition

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church

The Word of God Times Three: Part 1, Part 2
Jews were the first to identify the God of the Bible, and they wrote down his words in their epic anthology which they call by the acronym, the TaNaK. Frank Peters, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, begins this three part series, looking at how revelation and transmission is understood in the Jewish tradition

Female orgasm
Professor Emerita Beverly Whipple from Rutgers University in New Jersey is co-author of the famous bestselling book The G Spot. Today she talks about the female orgasm in detail, about some myths, some assumptions and facts.


Motivating students

Space, Genes, Evolution and Religion

Sex, Guilt and Religion

Spiritual Classics: Teresa of Avila, and John T. Robinson

David Leavitt on Alan Turing

Whose English is it, anyway?

Consciousness, Science, and God

"John Stossel Goes to Washington"

Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't

India's Development Paradox, featuring Parth Shah

School Choice in India, featuring Parth Shah

Subprime Scare Stories, featuring Alan Reynolds

Ludvigson of NYU Says Spending `Resilient' to Housing Drop

Griswold of Cato Says U.S. Should Legalize Undocumented Workers

The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan

'I am thinking now'- Can a liberal arts education save Africa?

Interesting and a moving speech by Patrick Awuah;


"Three things kept coming up for every problem; corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them"

This is what William Easterly said about him;

Meanwhile, for a Ghanaian man named Patrick Awuah, 2005 was the fourth year of running a successful private university that he started with his own money: Ashesi University, the "Swarthmore of Ghana." The university reserves half the spaces in its entering class for poor students on scholarship. "We want to train people as critical thinkers," Awuah says. One of his most satisfying moments came when a student sent him an e-mail: "Mr. Awuah, I am thinking now."

Awuah says that he could do more, but like some other enterprising individuals in Africa I know of, he has been turned away by official aid agencies. Everyone, it seems, was invited to the "Save Africa" campaign of 2005 except for Africans. They starred only as victims: genocide casualties, child soldiers, AIDS patients and famine deaths on our 43-inch plasma screens.

For Discussion: I've often wondered from where all these corrupt parliamentarians and politicians are coming from- I would have thought education aught to make a difference. A minority appears educated in the best 'liberal arts colleges' of the world but the majority of these corrupt civil servants, etc are being produced locally. Thinking critically can be taught but can we teach integrity?

Related;
Building a University, and Hope, in Ghana

Zimbabwe Watch- The Economy as Opposition

Harare forced into U-turn on price cap;

Just 24 hours after announcing a blanket freeze on wages, salaries and service charges, the Zimbabwean government at the weekend eased more of its price controls by allowing the tourist industry to increase its rates by up to 50 per cent.

The moves, which indicate growing indecision within President Robert Mugabe’s administration, follow a price freeze imposed at the end of June, which has been partially relaxed in the past few weeks as supermarket shelves empty and shortages worsen. The six-month wage freeze imposed on Friday bars employers and service providers, including schools and doctors, from increasing wages or fees.

Freeze on Wages Is Latest Step to Stanch Inflation in Zimbabwe;

Harare’s Financial Gazette newspaper, which is controlled by the president of the government’s reserve bank, Gideon Gono, reported in this week’s edition that value-added tax receipts had dropped by up to 90 percent since the price-cutting campaign began.

The Zimbabwe Independent, one of the few newspapers not under government ownership, reported that the price cuts had cost the government 13 trillion Zimbabwe dollars in lost tax revenue. At current black market rates, that totals about $55 million — a vast sum for a government that is already technically bankrupt.

The government continues to function by printing money to pay its bills, but as the currency has dwindled in value, state workers have increasingly demanded regular raises. Zimbabwe’s 100,000 teachers, all government employees, have been threatening to strike if their pay is not increased.

Sub Prime Lessons

-Lessons from Subprime Turbulence

Two Candidates for the IMF top job

Strauss-Kahn

Josef Tošovský

You Tube of the Day- The Seduction of War

Chris Hedges talks about 'War is Force that Give us Meaning'

Science Blog of the Day

The Happy Scientist

Quote of the Day

“To understand Singapore, you’ve got to start off with an improbable story: It should not exist.”
-Lee Kuan Yew

Does anybody know what's really happening in Darfur?

Chaos in Darfur on Rise as Arabs Fight With Arabs

I like to hear an anthropologist and an environmentalist talk about the issue. I don't think newspaper reporters fully understand the complexity of African tribal culture

Markets in Everything- A Prayer Book for Atheists?

Now the nation’s largest Jewish movement, Reform Judaism, is preparing to adopt a new prayer book that was intended to offer something for everyone — traditionalists, progressives and everyone else — even those who do not believe in God.

-In New Prayer Book, Signs of Broad Change

Attempt a Ph.D to Discover the Meaning of Life?

Some advice from Paul Kedrosky;

No, it's not that doing a Ph.D. was such a wonderful creativity-unleashing exercise, one that filled my mind with limitless possibilities and prospects. Far from it. I actually found it a fairly mundane and bureaucratic bit of business, more a question of cranking out a sufficiently lengthy document to the satisfaction of your thesis committee.

Instead, what I found out when doing my thesis -- and something I noticed in pretty much everyone I knew who at least started one -- was that you mostly discovered what else you were interested in. Why? Because pretty much anything else is more absorbing than writing a 400-page Ph.D. thesis.

In my case I discovered I was interested in quantitative finance, journalism and media, juggling (balls and especially pins), sky-diving, mountain-biking, hiking, Iran-Contra, marathon running, snow climbing, Franz Kafka, Rainer Marie Rilke, etc. All of those obsessions sprung unbidden onto my calendar when I should have been working on my Ph.D. thesis instead.

I saw something similar happen in other people I knew then (and know now), with people discovering pen collecting, acting, novel-writing, ultra-marathons, orienteering, and pretty much anything else you might imagine.

It turns out, it seems, that doing a Ph.D. (even if you drop out, which I generally recommend) is a great way to discover what you want in life, albeit it will likely have little to do with the Ph.D. itself.

Blog of the Day

Conversations with History Blog

Nominations now open – The World’s Most Eccentric Living Economist

Quote of the Day- The Power of Humanity

In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

- Daniel Kahneman

Why CIA Experts are no better than the Average Person

A great lecture on Intuition: The Marvels and Flaws by Daniel Kahneman

Some Notes;

How Skills are acquired; To become a chess master;
-10,000 dollars of practice (same to become a good violinist)
-person would have acquired somewhere 50,000 to 100,000 discrete configurations of pieces that are meaningful...
- you need fast feedback of success and failure

-We are enormously suggestive…we can be manipulated

-Military and Strategic Experts when it comes to medium and longterm predictions 'cannot predict better than the average reader of New York Times'

My Index to Talk; Philip E. Tetlock / Two Systems of Thought-Intuition & Rational Thought /How Doctors Make Decisions / associative coherence / Malcolm Gladwell / Theory of Rational Agent / Framing Effects / Gary A. Klein / Anchoring / How we think about History / Heuristic Thinking /Chess Master Intuition / Blink /Amos Tversky

Related;
Why Hawks Win By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon
Prospect Theory
Bridging the Gaps
The man who wasn't there
Rethinking thinking;

A quick tour of the key observations made by these psychologists would make even Mr Spock’s head spin. For example, people appear to be disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, and will often pass up even benefits within reach to avoid a small risk of feeling they have failed. They are also prone to cognitive dissonance: holding a belief plainly at odds with the evidence, usually because the belief has been held and cherished for a long time. Psychiatrists sometimes call this “denial”.

And then there is anchoring: people are often overly influenced by outside suggestion. People can be influenced even when they know that the suggestion is not being made by someone who is better informed. In one experiment, volunteers were asked a series of questions whose answers were in percentages—such as what percentage of African countries is in the United Nations? A wheel with numbers from one to 100 was spun in front of them; they were then asked to say whether their answer was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and then to give their answer. These answers were strongly influenced by the randomly selected, irrelevant number on the wheel. The average guess when the wheel showed 10 was 25%; when it showed 65 it was 45%.

Experiments show that most people apparently also suffer from status quo bias: they are willing to take bigger gambles to maintain the status quo than they would be to acquire it in the first place. In one common experiment, mugs are allocated randomly to some people in a group. Those who have them are asked to name a price to sell their mug; those without one are asked to name a price at which they will buy. Usually, the average sales price is considerably higher than the average offer price.

Expected-utility theory assumes that people look at individual decisions in the context of the big picture. But psychologists have found that, in fact, they tend to compartmentalise, often on superficial grounds. They then make choices about things in one particular mental compartment without taking account of the implications for things in other compartments.

There is also a huge amount of evidence that people are persistently, and irrationally, over-confident. Asked to answer a factual question, then asked to give the probability that their answer was correct, people typically overestimate this probability. This may be due to a representativeness heuristic: a tendency to treat events as representative of some well-known class or pattern. This gives people a sense of familiarity with an event and thus confidence that they have accurately diagnosed it. This can lead people to “see” patterns in data even where there are none. A closely related phenomenon is the availability heuristic: people focus excessive attention on a particular fact or event, rather than the big picture, simply because it is more visible or fresher in their mind.

Another delightfully human habit is magical thinking: attributing to one’s own actions something that had nothing to do with them, and thus assuming that one has a greater influence over events than is actually the case. For instance, an investor who luckily buys a share that goes on to beat the market may become convinced that he is a skilful investor rather than a merely fortunate one. He may also fall prey to quasi-magical thinking—behaving as if he believes his thoughts can influence events, even though he knows that they can’t.

Most people, say psychologists, are also vulnerable to hindsight bias: once something happens, they overestimate the extent to which they could have predicted it. Closely related to this is memory bias: when something happens people often persuade themselves that they actually predicted it, even when they didn’t.

Freud, finance and folly;


Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk by Daniel Kahneman; Amos Tversky
Indignation: Psychology, Politics, Law
"The Church of Economics Has Admitted and Even Rewarded Some Scholars Who Would have been Considered Heretics in Earlier Periods"
Everybody's an Expert
The Power of Intuition
Behaviourists at the gates
Neoclassical Theory Versus Prospect Theory: Evidence from the Marketplace

Behavioral Economics: 2 different streams of thought

Multimedia;
Conversation with History Interview (podcast)
Explorations of Mind; Well Being
Maps of Bounded Rationality
Paradox of Choice
A discussion with John Smutniak, Economics correspondent of The Economist, author of survey on Risk

The Secret to Good Wine

According to Orley Ashenfelter;

Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall

Source; Super Crunchers, p.2

related;
Liquid Assets

A History of Western Breasts

Some book recommendations-all by Marilyn Yalom;

Birth of the Chess Queen: A History

A History of the Breast

A History Of The Wife

For Yalom the Dutch Republic of the 17th century played a special role in the history of breasts. Dutch 17th century art portrayed a new attitude toward breasts in the domestic realm of the home. Bourgeois women were featured affectionately nursing their babes - a message not only visible in art but also endorsed in word by moralists. The domestic breasts of Dutch women were not torn between their sacred obligations of nursing their children and the erotic desires of their husbands. A husband's hand on the breast of his wife - a common genre - not only insinuated possession but also reflected a feeling of intimacy, friendship, tenderness, and respect which Yalom argues "suggests that the breast to be shared also contains a heart".

In the late 18th century breasts became politically stigmatized. With the onset of the French Revolution, the aristocratic custom of wet-nursing and sending children out to the countryside was replaced by bourgeois norms of maternal breastfeeding. A mother suckling her infant came to represent a morally good mother who would raise her children into virtuous French citizens. In Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People a bare-breasted Liberty is shown leading the people to victory. During political crises Marianne's unconcealed bosom would be used time and time again. In the First World War French posters portrayed Marianne standing next to a canon with her hair swaying in the wind and "upright breasts defying the German army". America also used her Statue of Liberty to drum up support for the war cause. Unlike France's Marianne, America's Puritan Liberty flaunted no bare breasts, but the accentuation of her clothed but well-endowed buxomness left little for the imagination.

For the Second World War, posters of women personifying the nation were replaced by real women in various work situations. Especially in the Second World War breasts took on a larger form. According to Yalom during troublesome times in history the biological differences between men and women tend to become more emphasized. Big-breasted girls featured as pin-ups and even on the noses of airplanes reminded the boys fighting oversees of what war destroys: "love, intimacy, nurturance". However, the mode initiated by Hollywood "bombshells" did not end after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The post-war American motion picture industry carried the torch with big-breasted actresses like Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, and Jayne Mansfield on to the big screen. Film-makers and advertisers, especially, realized that if breasts could sell the war then they might promote more besides. The bosom became a commercial attribute. A well-endowed pretty girl in a commercial or advertisement can virtually sell anything: fruit, cars, coffee, and probably manure to farmers if needed.

This mania only enhanced the cult of the breast culture in America which spread over the rest of the West like wild fire. But in America the culture of the breast became more polarized and hypocritical. While women like Pamela Anderson make no secret of their silicon augmentations and teasingly flaunt their wares, breastfeeding mothers in some states can be arrested for indecent exposure if they nurse their children in public places such as restaurants or parks. The contemporary breast is in a state of confusion. There are too many realities of the breast in our culture. From the outside, the eye of the beholder of the breast has come to represent many things to many people. As Yalom concludes "Babies see food. Men see sex. Doctors see disease. Businessmen see dollar signs. Religious authorities transform breasts into spiritual symbols, whereas politicians appropriate them for nationalistic ends".

Related;
Chess Bitch: Women In The Ultimate Intellectual Sport
Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters Changed the Game of Chess

Chess in School

The Grandmaster Experiment

Jennifer Shahade, Chess Queen

Power Play;

Yalom definitely has a point: the game that washed up on the beaches of the Costa del Sol had no chessmen, it had chess lumps, because the Koran forbade the depiction of living creatures like men, women and horses; also, it had no queen. The king's sidekick was a man -- the vizier -- and was the weakest piece on the board, permitted to move only one measly square per turn, on the diagonal. (Indeed, games that feature the vizier and abstract pieces live on, mostly in the Middle East and India.) The game we know today in the West had begun to take shape by the end of the 10th century, when the chess queen surfaced in manuscripts in a Swiss monastery; in the 11th century, ivory chess queens turned up in Italy; and in Spain, a queen with a face finally appeared in the 12th century. Dwarfed by her ivory throne, she looks, Yalom writes, as if she were ''sitting in a bumper car.'' The queen needed those bumpers over the next 300 years, as she transformed herself into the crowned powerhouse that we and Garry Kasparov recognize today, who swoops across the board, forward and backward, diagonally and sideways, knocking down any knight, pawn, bishop or rival queen in her path. However did she do it?

Yalom's entertaining (and credible) contention is that the booting of the vizier and the coronation of the queen are linked to the rising status of women in medieval Europe: ''The miraculous Virgin, the chess queen and the beloved lady grew up together and reinforced one another,'' she explains, referring to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the tradition of courtly love. Also crucial, Yalom believes, was the example of medieval warrior queens, who made a chessboard without a queen seem as incomplete as a Ferrari without an engine.

In Spain there was Toda of Navarre, in the 10th century, who went to battle to install her grandson on the throne of Léon; and Urraca of Galicia, who divorced her husband, King Alfonso I of Aragón and Navarre, waged war on him (she won), retook Portugal and then a lover; and (skipping a few generations of Amazons) Queen Isabella of Castile, who united the country, financed Christopher Columbus's foreign travel, exiled Spain's Jews, expelled the Moors and in her spare time ran the Spanish Inquisition. Elsewhere in Europe, there was Adelaide of Burgundy (later a Holy Roman empress), Matilda of Tuscany (she led her troops into battle on horseback) and Catherine the Great. Roping in two others, Eleanor of Aquitaine in France, whose court was a beacon to courtly love, and the pious Marianist, Blanche of Castile, Yalom declares, ''Their illustrious reigns coincided with the spread of chess in France and England, and enhanced the prestige of the queen on the board.''

The Vanity of Breast-Feeding

Audio;

Interview with Jennifer Shahade

Marilyn Yalom: "A History of the Wife"

Birth of the Chess Queen

All about Predictions

Predict Your Child's Due Date

Predict Your Child's Adult Height

Predict Tennis Winner

Predict Heart Disease Risk

Predict Liver Disease Survivability

Predict GDP three quarters ahead

Why does all that is above matter? Read Ian Ayers book, Super Crunchers

Via Greg Mankiw

Saladin and Game Theory

A documentary about Saladin (edited a bit by the person who uploaded it)- Part 1, 2, 3

Related;
Saladin Animated Series

Game Theory in the Middle East

India's Cotton Farmers

Latest Foreign Exchange Show;

Intellectual Property Rights for Warriors

The pastoralist Karamojong people in the North Eastern region of Uganda are a very unhappy lot - they say that people are impoverishing them by pirating their inventions and technology with impunity.

The Karamojong blacksmiths are particularly annoyed that their special rat traps which used to sell like hot cakes countrywide, including in the capital Kampala, have lost their share of the market because some producers have stolen their technology and fabricated the rat traps...

Just one Karamojong trap is capable of netting as many as 10 rats at a go, while the traps imported from places like India are capable of killing only one rat at a time.

The Karamojong have also earned themselves the reputation of being the first tribe in Uganda to invent the most durable sandals using old tyres from tractors and heavy goods lorries.

These cheap and durable sandals are very popular among Ugandan villagers.

Then there is the unique haircut, nicknamed the Kajong Cut by the barbers in Uganda and which is in great demand among the youth and the not so young, which the Karamojong also 'invented'.

-Ugandan inventors condemn ideas pirates

Related;
The Karamojong;

"If you do not own a cow in Karamoja, you can't be allowed to address a congregation because you are not valued as a person," exclaims Lolem seriously.

The Karamajong accumulate their cattle either through inheritance by patrilineal descent or marriage. When a woman first arrives at her husband's, he is expected to allocate cattle to exclusively feed her and her children and these are to be increased as she bares more children.

It is this act of transferring cattle from the man's to the woman's side that makes her children legitimate members of her husband's lineage. The bride price also comprises entirely of cattle, the other gifts that may be offered are not as significant as the cattle

Before raids became an offence per the government of Uganda, the elders granted young men permission and a formal ritual of blessing was performed. In this way they also accumulated their cattle from raiding their neighbors, even those across the border in Kenya...

"A typical Karamajong dispute begins when someone seizes a stock he thinks are owed to him. If the elders decide on who is to pay and he does not admit the debt then they will order the other to take the stock from him (the adjudged), thus a raid," writes Lucy Mair, an honorary professor of Anthropology for the University of Kent in her book African Societies.

Karamojong Neck rest

Interview with anthropologist Lucy Nair

Best Anthropology Blog- Savage Minds

War and Peace in Africa- Paul Collier